Poisson Bracket and Symplectic Structure of Covariant Canonical Formalism of Fields

Abstract: The covariant canonical formalism is a covariant extension of the traditional canonical formalism of fields. In contrast to the traditional canonical theory, it has a remarkable feature that canonical equations of gauge theories or gravity are not only manifestly Lorentz covariant but also gauge covariant or diffeomorphism covariant. A mathematical peculiarity of the covariant canonical formalism is that its canonical coordinates are differential forms on a manifold. In the present paper, we find a natural Poisson bracket of this new canonical theory, and study symplectic structure behind it. The phase space of the theory is identified with a ringed space with the structure sheaf of the graded algebra of "differentiable" differential forms on the manifold. The Poisson and the symplectic structure we found can be even or odd, depending on the dimension of the manifold. Our Poisson structure is an example of physical application of Poisson structure defined on the graded algebra of differential forms.