Variational reduction of Hamiltonian systems with general constraints

Abstract

In the Hamiltonian formalism, and in the presence of a symmetry Lie group, a variational reduction procedure has already been developed for Hamiltonian systems without constraints. In this paper we present a procedure of the same kind, but for the entire class of the higher order constrained systems (HOCS), described in the Hamiltonian formalism. Last systems include the standard and generalized nonholonomic Hamiltonian systems as particular cases. When restricted to Hamiltonian systems without constraints, our procedure gives rise exactly to the so-called Hamilton-Poincaré equations, as expected. In order to illustrate the procedure, we study in detail the case in which both the configuration space of the system and the involved symmetry define a trivial principal bundle.