Quadratic First Integrals of Constrained Autonomous Conservative Dynamical Systems with Fixed Energy

Abstract

We consider autonomous conservative dynamical systems which are constrained with the condition that the total energy of the system has a specified value. We prove a theorem which provides the quadratic first integrals (QFIs), time-dependent and autonomous, of these systems in terms of the symmetries (conformal Killing vectors and conformal Killing tensors) of the kinetic metric. It is proved that there are three types of QFIs and for each type we give explicit formulae for their computation. It is also shown that when the autonomous QFIs are considered, then we recover the known results of previous works. For a zero potential function, we have the case of constrained geodesics and obtain formulae to compute their QFIs. The theorem is applied in two cases. In the first case, we determine potentials which admit the second of the three types of QFIs. We recover a superintegrable potential of the Ermakov type and a new integrable potential whose trajectories for zero energy and zero QFI are circles. In the second case, we integrate the constrained geodesic equations for a family of two-dimensional conformally flat metrics.