The Euler-Poincare Equations and Double Bracket Dissipation

This paper studies the perturbation of a Lie-Poisson (or, equivalently an Euler-Poincare) system by a special dissipation term that has Brockett's double bracket form. We show that a formally unstable equilibrium of the unperturbed system becomes a spectrally and hence nonlinearly unstable equilibrium after the perturbation is added. We also investigate the geometry of this dissipation mechanism and its relation to Rayleigh dissipation functions. This work complements our earlier work (Bloch, Krishnaprasad,Marsden and Ratiu [1991, 1994]) in which we studied the corresponding problem for systems with symmetry with the dissipation added to the internal variables; here it is added directly or Lie algebra variables. The mechanisms discussed here include a number of interesting examples of physical interest such as the Landau-Lifschitz equations for ferromagnetism, certain models for dissipative rigid body dynamics and geophysical fluids, and certain relative equilibria in plasma physics and stellar dynamics.