Projectively and affinely invariant PDEs on hypersurfaces

Abstract

In [Alekseevsky, Gutt, Manno, Moreno: "A general method to construct invariant PDEs on homogeneous manifolds", Communications in Contemporary Mathematics (2021)] the authors have developed a method for constructing $G$-invariant PDEs imposed on hypersurfaces of an $(n+1)$-dimensional homogeneous space $G/H$, under mild assumptions on the Lie groups $G$. In the present paper the method is applied to the case when $G=\mathsf{PGL}(n+1)$ or $G=\mathsf{Aff}(n+1)$ and the homogeneous space $G/H$ is the $(n+1)$-dimensional projective ${\mathbb{P}}^{n+1}$ or affine ${\mathbb{A}}^{n+1}$ space, respectively. The paper's main result is that projectively or affinely invariant PDEs with $n$ independent and one unknown variables are in one-to-one correspondence with $\mathsf{CO}(d,n-d)$-invariant hypersurfaces of the space of trace-free cubic forms in $n$ variables. Local descriptions are also provided.

14 pages, 1 figure; to appear in Proceedings of the Edinburgh Mathematical Society