Past exam of the mathematics course of the University of Cambridge 2024 ii Paper 2 8E c Solution Created 2026-09-24 Updated 2026-10-03
Let and . Sincethe Lagrangian depends on only through and , and on the velocity through . Rotations about the -axis preserve all three quantities, proving the invariance.
The axially symmetric isotropic-mass Lagrangian therefore conserves the axial angular momentumup to an irrelevant normalization of . Since has no explicit time dependence, conservation of energy from time-translation invariance gives the second conserved quantity