Singular Poisson tensors

Abstract

The Hamiltonian structures discovered by Morrison and Greene for various fluid equations were obtained by guessing a Hamiltonian and a suitable Poisson bracket formula, expressed in terms of noncanonical (but physical) coordinates. In general, such a procedure for obtaining a Hamiltonian system does not produce a Hamiltonian phase space in the usual sense (a symplectic manifold), but rather a family of symplectic manifolds. To state the matter in terms of a system with a finite number of degrees of freedom, the family of symplectic manifolds is parametrized by a set of Casimir functions, which are characterized by having vanishing Poisson brackets with all other functions. The number of independent Casimir functions is the corank of the Poisson tensor Jij, the components of which are the Poisson brackets of the coordinates among themselves. Thus, these Casimir functions exist only when the Poisson tensor is singular.