Contact Lie systems on Riemannian and Lorentzian spaces: from scaling symmetries to curvature-dependent reductions

Abstract: We propose an adaptation of the notion of scaling symmetries for the case of Lie-Hamilton systems, allowing their subsequent reduction to contact Lie systems. As an illustration of the procedure, time-dependent frequency oscillators and time-dependent thermodynamic systems are analyzed from this point of view. The formalism provides a novel method for constructing contact Lie systems on the three-dimensional sphere, derived from recently established Lie-Hamilton systems arising from the fundamental four-dimensional representation of the symplectic Lie algebra $\mathfrak{sp}(4,\mathbb{R})$. It is shown that these systems are a particular case of a larger hierarchy of contact Lie systems on a special class of three-dimensional homogeneous spaces, namely the Cayley-Klein spaces. These include Riemannian spaces (sphere, hyperbolic and Euclidean spaces), pseudo-Riemannian spaces (anti-de Sitter, de Sitter and Minkowski spacetimes), as well as Newtonian or non-relativistic spacetimes. Under certain topological conditions, some of these systems retrieve well-known two-dimensional Lie-Hamilton systems through a curvature-dependent reduction.