# The geometry of nonholonomic Chaplygin systems revisited

## TL;DR

This paper introduces a geometric tensor for nonholonomic Chaplygin systems that helps analyze their dynamics, measure preservation, and Hamiltonisation, providing new insights and proofs for classical systems like Veselova.

## Contribution

It defines the gyroscopic tensor on the shape space and uses it to derive conditions for Hamiltonisation and measure preservation, offering a unified geometric framework.

## Key findings

- Derived an almost symplectic form for reduced dynamics.
- Provided conditions for measure preservation and Hamiltonisation.
- Reproved Hamiltonisation of the Veselova system using the new tensor.

## Abstract

We consider nonholonomic Chaplygin systems and associate to them a $(1,2)$ tensor field on the shape space, that we term the gyroscopic tensor, and that measures the interplay between the non-integrability of the constraint distribution and the kinetic energy metric. We show how this tensor may be naturally used to derive an almost symplectic description of the reduced dynamics. Moreover, we express sufficient conditions for measure preservation and Hamiltonisation via Chaplygin's reducing multiplier method in terms of the properties of this tensor. The theory is used to give a new proof of the remarkable Hamiltonisation of the multi-dimensional Veselova system obtained by Fedorov and Jovanovi\'c in J. Nonlinear Sci. 2004, and Reg. Chaot. Dyn. 2009.