Symplectic and Lie algebraic techniques in Geometric Optics

Maxwell's Optics Symplectic Hamiltonian

The Hamiltonian formalism is extremely elegant and convenient to mechanics problems. However, its application to the classical field theories is a difficult task. In fact, you can set one to one correspondence between the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian in the case of hyperregular Lagrangian. It is impossible to do the same in gauge-invariant field theories. In the case of irregular Lagrangian the Dirac Hamiltonian formalism with constraints is usually used, and this leads to a number of certain difficulties. The paper proposes a reformulation of the problem to the case of a field without sources. …