Covariant Poisson Brackets in Geometric Field Theory

We establish a link between the multisymplectic and the covariant phase space approach to geometric field theory by showing how to derive the symplectic form on the latter, as introduced by Crnkovic-Witten and Zuckerman, from the multisymplectic form. The main result is that the Poisson bracket associated with this symplectic structure, according to the standard rules, is precisely the covariant bracket due to Peierls and DeWitt.Comment: 42 page

Maximal Subgroups of Compact Lie Groups

This report aims at giving a general overview on the classification of the maximal subgroups of compact Lie groups (not necessarily connected). In the first part, it is shown that these fall naturally into three types: (1) those of trivial type, which are simply defined as inverse images of maximal subgroups of the corresponding component group under the canonical projection and whose classification constitutes a problem in finite group theory, (2) those of normal type, whose connected one-component is a normal subgroup, and (3) those of normalizer type, which are the normalizers of their own connected one-component. It is also shown how to reduce the classification of maximal subgroups of the last two types to: (2) the classification of the finite maximal $\Sigma$-invariant subgroups of center-free connected compact simple Lie groups and (3) the classification of the $\Sigma$-primitive subalgebras of compact simple Lie algebras, where $\Sigma$ is a subgroup of the corresponding outer automorphism group. In the second part, we explicitly compute the normalizers of the primitive subalgebras of the compact classical Lie algebras (in the corresponding classical groups), thus arriving at the complete classification of all (non-discrete) maximal subgroups of the compact classical Lie groups.Comment: 83 pages. Final versio

New Results on the Canonical Structure of Classical Non-Linear Sigma Models

The material presented here is based on recent work of the author (done in collaboration with colleagues from the University of Freiburg and from the University of Sao Paulo) which has produced new insight into the algebraic structure of classical non-linear sigma models as (infinite-dimensional) Hamiltonian systems [1-5]