On the formalism of local variational differential operators

Abstract

The calculus of local variational differential operators introduced by B. L. Voronov, I. V. Tyutin, and Sh. S. Shakhverdiev is studied in the context of jet super space geometry. In a coordinate-free way, we relate these operators to variational multivectors, for which we introduce and compute the variational Poisson and Schouten brackets by means of a unifying algebraic scheme. We give a geometric definition of the algebra of multilocal functionals and prove that local variational differential operators are well defined on this algebra. To achieve this, we obtain some analytical results on the calculus of variations in smooth vector bundles, which may be of independent interest. In addition, our results give a new a new efficient method for finding Hamiltonian structures of differential equations