The purpose of this paper is to define the concept of multi-Dirac structures and to describe their role in the description of classical field theories. We begin by outlining a variational principle for field theories, referred to as the Hamilton-Pont
ryagin principle, and we show that the resulting field equations are the Euler-Lagrange equations in implicit form. Secondly, we introduce multi-Dirac structures as a graded analog of standard Dirac structures, and we show that the graph of a multisymplectic form determines a multi-Dirac structure. We then discuss the role of multi-Dirac structures in field theory by showing that the implicit field equations obtained from the Hamilton-Pontryagin principle can be described intrinsically using multi-Dirac structures. Furthermore, we show that any multi-Dirac structure naturally gives rise to a multi-Poisson bracket. We treat the case of field theories with nonholonomic constraints, showing that the integrability of the constraints is equivalent to the integrability of the underlying multi-Dirac structure. We finish with a number of illustrative examples, including time-dependent mechanics, nonlinear scalar fields and the electromagnetic field.
We consider the motion of a two-dimensional body of arbitrary shape in a planar irrotational, incompressible fluid with a given amount of circulation around the body. We derive the equations of motion for this system by performing symplectic reductio
n with respect to the group of volume-preserving diffeomorphisms and obtain the relevant Poisson structures after a further Poisson reduction with respect to the group of translations and rotations. In this way, we recover the equations of motion given for this system by Chaplygin and Lamb, and we give a geometric interpretation for the Kutta-Zhukowski force as a curvature-related effect. In addition, we show that the motion of a rigid body with circulation can be understood as a geodesic flow on a central extension of the special Euclidian group SE(2), and we relate the cocycle in the description of this central extension to a certain curvature tensor.
