We consider the Vlasov equation in any spatial dimension, which has long been known [ZI76, Mor80, Gib81, MW82] to be an infinite-dimensional Hamiltonian system whose bracket structure is of Lie–Poisson type. In parallel, it is classical that the Vlasov equation is a mean-field limit for a pairwise interacting Newtonian system. Motivated by this knowledge, we provide a rigorous derivation of the Hamiltonian structure of the Vlasov equation, both the Hamiltonian functional and Poisson bracket, directly from the many-body problem. One may view this work as a classical counterpart to [MNP+20], which provided a rigorous derivation of the Hamiltonian structure of the cubic nonlinear Schrödinger equation from the many-body problem for interacting bosons in a certain infinite particle number limit, the first result of its kind. In particular, our work settles a question of Marsden, Morrison and Weinstein [MMW84] on providing a ‘statistical basis’ for the bracket structure of the Vlasov equation.

We define partial differential ($\text{PD}$ in the following), i.e., field theoretic analogues of Hamiltonian systems on abstract symplectic manifolds and study their main properties, namely, $\text{PD}$ Hamilton equations, $\text{PD}$ Noether theorem, $\text{PD}$ Poisson bracket, etc. Unlike the standard multisymplectic approach to Hamiltonian field theory, in our formalism, the geometric structure (kinematics) and the dynamical information on the “phase space” appear as just different components of one single geometric object.