A method to construct general null Lagrangians and their exact gauge functions is developed. The functions are used to define classical forces independently from Newtonian dynamics. It is shown that the forces generated by the exact gauge functions allow for the conversion of the first Newton equation into the second one. The presented approach gives new insights into the origin of forces in Classical Mechanics.
Null Lagrangians and their gauge functions are derived for given standard and non-standard Lagrangians. The obtained standard null Lagrangians generalize those previously found but the non-standard null Lagrangians are new. The gauge functions are used to make the action invariant and introduce the exact null Lagrangians, which form a new family of null Lagrangians. The conditions required for the action to be invariant are derived for all null Lagrangians presented in this paper, thus, making them exact. As a specific application, the exact null Lagrangians are derived for a second-order ordi…
A method for constructing general null Lagrangians and their higher harmonics is presented for dynamical systems with one degree of freedom. It is shown that these Lagrangians can be used to obtain non-standard Lagrangians, which give equations of motion for the law of inertia and some dissipative dynamical systems. The necessary condition for deriving equations of motion by using null Lagrangians is presented, and it is demonstrated that this condition plays the same role for null Lagrangians as the Euler-Lagrange equation plays for standard and non-standard Lagrangians. The obtained results …
Newtonian, Lagrangian, and Hamiltonian dynamical systems are well formalized mathematically. They give rise to geometric structures describing motion of a point in smooth manifolds. Riemannian metric is a different geometric structure formalizing concepts of length and angle. The interplay of Riemannian metric and its metric connection with mechanical structures produces some features which are absent in the case of general (non-Riemannian) manifolds. The aim of present paper is to discuss these features and develop special language for describing Newtonian, Lagrangian, and Hamiltonian dynamic…
Among different Lagrangians, null Lagrangians are known for having identically zero the Euler-Lagrange equation and, therefore, they have no effects on the resulting equations of motion. However, there is a special family of null Lagrangians that can be used to convert linear and undriven equations of motion into nonlinear and driven ones. To identify this special family, general null Lagrangians and their gauge functions are constructed for second-order ordinary differential equations of motion describing one-dimensional dynamical systems. The gauge functions corresponding to forces and nonli…
Based on the works of Gordon ([4]) and Zhang-Zhou([8])) on the variational minimizing properties for Keplerian orbits and Lagrangian solutions of Newtonian 2-body and 3-body problems, we use the constrained variational principle of Ambrosetti-Coti Zelati ([1]) to compute the Lagrangian actions on Keplerian and Lagrangian elliptical solutions with fixed energies, we also find an interesting relationship between period and energy for Lagrangian elliptical solutions with Newtonian potentials.
An exact expression for the gravitational field strength in a self-gravitating dust continuum is derived within the Lagrangian picture of continuum mechanics. From the Euler-Newton system a transport equation for the gravitational field strength is formulated and then integrated along trajectories of continuum elements. The resulting integral solves one of the Lagrangian equations of the corresponding Lagrange-Newton system in general. Relations to known exact solutions without symmetry in Newtonian gravity are discussed. The presented integral may be employed to access the non-perturbative re…
Standard and non-standard Lagrangians that give the same equation of motion are significantly different in their forms, as the latter do not have terms that clearly discernable energy-like expressions. A special family of these Lagrangians are null Lagrangians and their gauge functions. It is shown that non-standard null Lagrangians and their gauge functions can be used to introduce dissipative forces to dynamical systems. With standard null Lagrangians being known for introducing non-dissipative forces, the presented results allow for a complete picture of novel roles played by null Lagrangia…
The present paper derives the post-Newtonian Lagrangian of translational motion of N arbitrary-structured bodies with all mass and spin multipoles in a scalar-tensor theory of gravity. The multipoles depend on time and evolve in accordance with their own dynamic equations of motion. The Lagrangian is retrieved from the post-Newtonian equations of motion by solving the inverse problem of the Lagrangian mechanics and generalizes a well-known Lagrangian of pole-dipole-quadrupole massive particles to the particles of higher multipolarity. Analytic treatment of the higher-order multipole contributi…
The space of Null Lagrangians is the least investigated territory in dynamics since they are identically sent to zero by their Euler-Lagrange operator and thereby having no effects on equations of motion. A humble effort to discover the relevance of these Null Lagrangians in dynamics is made by introducing a generalized procedure (with respect to the recent procedure introduced by the authors of this paper) that takes advantage of the null-ness of these Lagrangians to construct non-standard Lagrangians that represent a range of interesting dynamical systems. By using the generalized procedure,…
We show that the theory of self-adjoint differential equations can be used to provide a satisfactory solution of the inverse variational problem in classical mechanics. A Newtonian equation when transformed to the self-adjoint form allows one to find an appropriate Lagrangian representation (direct analytic representation) for it. On the other hand, the same Newtonian equation in conjunction with its adjoint provides a basis to construct a different Lagrangian representation (indirect analytic representation) for the system. We obtain the time-dependent Lagrangian of the damped Harmonic oscill…
Knotted solutions to electromagnetism are investigated as an independent subsector of the theory. We write down a Lagrangian and a Hamiltonian formulation of Bateman's construction for the knotted electromagnetic solutions. We introduce a general definition of the null condition and generalize the construction of Maxwell's theory to massless free complex scalar, its dual two form field, and to a massless DBI scalar. We set up the framework for quantizing the theory both in a path integral approach, as well as the canonical Dirac method for a constrained system. We make several observations abo…
This manuscript provides a characterisation of the equivalence class of classical smooth Lagrangian densities that involve terms depending on two distinct points of the underlying Euclidean base space of the theory. Theories of this type are referred to as non-local field theories, which are of particular interest in the group field theory approach to quantum gravity. The notion of equivalence of Lagrangian densities is set by physical indistinguishability by means of their equations of motion whose derivation is shown briefly. We expect our results to give a more comprehensive view on the non…
A frame independent formulation of analytical mechanics in the Newtonian space-time is presented. The differential geometry of affine values i.e., the differential geometry in which affine bundles replace vector bundles and sections of one dimensional affine bundles replace functions on manifolds, is used. Lagrangian and hamiltonian generating objects, together with the Legendre transformation independent on inertial frame are constructed.
A novel method to make Lagrangians Galilean invariant is developed. The method, based on null Lagrangians and their gauge functions, is used to demonstrate the Galilean invariance of the Lagrangian for Newton's law of inertia. It is suggested that this new solution of an old physics problem may have implications and potential applications to all gauge-based theories of physics.
In linear anisotropic elasticity, the elastic properties of a medium are described by the fourth rank elasticity tensor C. The decomposition of C into a partially symmetric tensor M and a partially antisymmetric tensors N is often used in the literature. An alternative, less well-known decomposition, into the completely symmetric part S of C plus the reminder A, turns out to be irreducible under the 3-dimensional general linear group. We show that the SA-decomposition is unique, irreducible, and preserves the symmetries of the elasticity tensor. The MN-decomposition fails to have these desirab…
The present paper outlines theoretical principles of the post-Newtonian mechanics in the expanding universe. It is based upon the gauge-invariant theory of the Lagrangian perturbations of cosmological manifold caused by an isolated astronomical N-body system. We postulate that the background manifold is described by Friedman-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) metric governed by two primary components - the dark matter and the dark energy. The dark matter is treated as an ideal fluid. The dark energy is described by a single scalar field with a potential which is hold unspecified as long as the t…
We use a trick similar to Weinberg's for adiabatic modes, in a Manton approximation for general relativity on manifolds with spatial boundary. This results in a description of the slow-time dependent solutions as null geodesics on the space of boundary diffeomorphisms, with respect to a metric we prove to be composed solely of the boundary data. We show how the solutions in the bulk space is determined with the constraints of general relativity. To give our description a larger perspective, we furthermore identify our resulting Lagrangian as a generalized version of the covariantized Lagrangia…