In this paper, we describe Routhian reduction as a special case of standard symplectic reduction, also called Marsden-Weinstein reduction. We use this correspondence to present a generalization of Routhian reduction for quasi-invariant Lagrangians, i.e., Lagrangians that are invariant up to a total time derivative. We show how functional Routhian reduction can be seen as a particular instance of reduction in a quasi-invariant Lagrangian, and we exhibit a Routhian reduction procedure for the special case of Lagrangians with quasicyclic coordinates. As an application, we consider the dynamics of a charged particle in a magnetic field.

Abstract. The aim of this paper is to propose an unambiguous intrinsic formalism for higherorder field theories which avoids the arbitrariness in the generalization of the conventional description of field theories, and implies the existence of different Cartan forms and Legendre transformations. We propose a differential-geometric setting for the dynamics of a higher-order field theory, based on the Skinner and Rusk formalism for mechanics. This approach incorporates aspects of both, the Lagrangian and the Hamiltonian description, since the field equations are formulated using the Lagrangian on a higher-order jet bundle and the canonical multisymplectic form on its affine dual. As both of these objects are uniquely defined, the Skinner-Rusk approach has the advantage that it does not suffer from the arbitrariness in conventional descriptions. The result is that we obtain a unique and global intrinsic version of the Euler-Lagrange equations for higher-order field theories. Several examples illustrate our construction.

We present a geometric framework for discrete classical field theories, where fields are modeled as "morphisms" defined on a discrete grid in the base space, and take values in a Lie groupoid. We describe the basic geometric setup and derive the field equations from a variational principle. We also show that the solutions of these equations are multisymplectic in the sense of Bridges and Marsden. The groupoid framework employed here allows us to recover not only some previously known results on discrete multisymplectic field theories, but also to derive a number of new results, most notably a notion of discrete Lie-Poisson equations and discrete reduction. In a final section, we establish the connection with discrete differential geometry and gauge theories on a lattice.Comment: 37 pages, 6 figures, uses xy-pic (v3: minor amendment to def. 3.5; remark 3.7 added

In this paper, we present a novel Lagrangian formulation of the equations of motion for point vortices on the unit 2-sphere. We show first that no linear Lagrangian formulation exists directly on the 2-sphere but that a Lagrangian may be constructed by pulling back the dynamics to the 3-sphere by means of the Hopf fibration. We then use the isomorphism of the 3-sphere with the Lie group SU (2) to derive a variational Lie group integrator for point vortices which is symplectic, second-order, and preserves the unit-length constraint. At the end of the paper, we compare our integrator with classical fourth-order Runge-Kutta, the second-order midpoint method, and a standard Lie group Munthe-Kaas method.