Gauge theory by canonical transformations

Electromagnetism, the strong and the weak interactions are commonly formulated as gauge theories in a Lagrangian description. In this paper, we present an alternative formal derivation of U(1)-gauge theory in a manifestly covariant Hamilton formalism. We make use of canonical transformations as our guiding tool to formalize the gauging procedure. The introduction of the gauge field, its transformation behavior and a dynamical gauge field Lagrangian/Hamiltonian are unavoidable consequences of this formalism, whereas the form of the free gauge Lagrangian/Hamiltonian depends on the selection of the gauge dependence of the canonically conjugate gauge fields.