In a recent Letter, Faddeev and Jackiw have shown that the reduction of constrained systems into its canonical, first-order form, can bring some new insight into the research of this field. For sympletic manifolds the geometrical structure, called Dirac or generalized bracket, is obtained directly from the inverse of the nonsingular sympletic two-form matrix. In the cases of nonsympletic manifolds, this two-form is degenerated and cannot be inverted to provide the generalized brackets. This singular behavior of the sympletic matrix is indicative of the presence of constraints that have to be carefully considered to yield to consistent results. One has two possible routes to treat this problem: Dirac has taught us how to implement the constraints into the potential part (Hamiltonian) of the canonical Lagrangian, leading to the well-known Dirac brackets, which are consistent with the constraints and can be mapped into quantum commutators (modulo ordering terms). The second route, suggested by Faddeev and Jackiw, and followed in this paper, is to implement the constraints directly into the canonical part of the first-order Lagrangian, using the fact that the consistence condition for the stability of the constrained manifold is linear in the time derivative. This algorithm may lead to an invertible two-form sympletic matrix from where the Dirac brackets are readily obtained. This algorithm is used here to investigate some aspects of the quantization of constrained systems with first- and second-class constraints in the sympletic approach.

It is shown that the symplectic two-form, which defines the geometrical structure of a constrained theory in the Faddeev-Jackiw approach, may be brought into a non-degenerated form, by an iterative implementation of the existing constraints. The resulting generalized brackets coincide with those obtained by the Dirac bracket approach, if the constrained system under investigation presents only second-class constraints. For gauge theories, a symmetry breaking term must be supplemented to bring the symplectic form into a non-singular configuration. At present, the singular symplectic two-form provides directly the generators of the time independent gauge transformations.

Using the general notions of Batalin, Fradkin, Fradkina and Tyutin to convert second class systems into first class ones, we present a gauge invariant formulation of the massive Yang-Mills theory by embedding it in an extended phase space. The infinite set of correction terms necessary for obtaining the involutive constraints and Hamiltonian is explicitly computed and expressed in a closed form. It is also shown that the extra fields introduced in the correction terms are exactly identified with the auxiliary scalars used in the generalized Stückelberg formalism for converting a gauge noninvariant Lagrangian into a gauge invariant form.

We propose a systematic method of dealing with the canonical constrained structure of reducible systems in the Dirac and symplectic approaches which involves an enlargement of phase and configuration spaces, respectively. It is not necessary, as in the Dirac approach, to isolate the independent subset of constraints or to introduce, as in the symplectic analysis, a series of lagrange multipliers-for-lagrange multipliers. This analysis illuminates the close connection between the Dirac and symplectic approaches of treating reducible theories, which is otherwise lacking. The example of p-form gauge fields (p = 2, 3) is analyzed in details.Total number of the manuscript pages: 24

We consider the method due to Batalin, Fradkin, Fradkina, and Tyutin (BFFT) that makes the conversion of second-class constraints into first-class ones for the case of nonlinear theories. We first present a general analysis of an attempt to simplify the method, showing the conditions that must be fulfilled in order to have first-class constraints for nonlinear theories but that are linear in the auxiliary variables. There are cases where this simplification cannot be done and the full BFFT method has to be used. However, in the way the method is formulated, we show with details that it is not practicable to be done. Finally, we speculate on a solution for these problems.Comment: 19 pages, Late

We analyze the dispersionless limits of the Kupershmidt equation, the SUSY KdV-B equation and the SUSY KdV equation. We present the Lax description for each of these models and bring out various properties associated with them as well as discuss open questions that need to be addressed in connection with these models.

We quantize the Einstein gravity in the formalism of weak gravitational fields by using the constrained Hamiltonian method. Special emphasis is given to the 2+1 spacetime dimensional case where a (topological) Chern-Simons term is added to the Lagrangian.

We use the BV quantization method for a theory with coupled tensor and vector gauge fields through a topological term. We consider in details the reducibility of the tensorial sector as well as the appearance of a mass term in the effective vectorial theory .