Peierls bracket

Template:Short description Template:More citations needed In theoretical physics, the Peierls bracket is an equivalent descriptionTemplate:Clarify of the Poisson bracket. It can be defined directly from the action and does not require the canonical coordinates and their canonical momenta to be defined in advance.Template:Clarify

The bracketTemplate:Clarify

$[A,B]$

is defined as

$D_A(B)-D_B(A)$,

as the difference between some kind of action of one quantity on the other, minus the flipped term.

In quantum mechanics, the Peierls bracket becomes a commutator i.e. a Lie bracket.

References

Peierls, R. "The Commutation Laws of Relativistic Field Theory," Proc. R. Soc. Lond. August 21, 1952 214 1117 143-157.

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