Paper 4, Section II, B
(a) Explain how the Hamiltonian of a system can be obtained from its Lagrangian . Deduce that the action can be written as
Show that Hamilton's equations are obtained if the action, computed between fixed initial and final configurations and , is minimized with respect to independent variations of and .
(b) Let be a new set of coordinates on the same phase space. If the old and new coordinates are related by a type-2 generating function such that
deduce that the canonical form of Hamilton's equations applies in the new coordinates, but with a new Hamiltonian given by
(c) For each of the Hamiltonians (i) , (ii) ,
express the general solution at time in terms of the initial values given by at time . In each case, show that the transformation from to is canonical for all values of , and find the corresponding generating function explicitly.