Hamiltonian structures for integrable hierarchies of Lagrangian PDEs

Abstract

Many integrable hierarchies of differential equations allow a variational description, called a Lagrangian multiform or a pluri-Lagrangian structure. The fundamental object in this theory is not a Lagrange function but a differential $d$-form that is integrated over arbitrary $d$-dimensional submanifolds. All such action integrals must be stationary for a field to be a solution to the pluri-Lagrangian problem. In this paper we present a procedure to obtain Hamiltonian structures from the pluri-Lagrangian formulation of an integrable hierarchy of PDEs. As a prelude, we review a similar procedure for integrable ODEs. We show that exterior derivative of the Lagrangian $d$-form is closely related to the Poisson brackets between the corresponding Hamilton functions. In the ODE (Lagrangian 1-form) case we discuss as examples the Toda hierarchy and the Kepler problem. As examples for the PDE (Lagrangian 2-form) case we present the potential and Schwarzian Korteweg-de Vries hierarchies, as well as the Boussinesq hierarchy.

34 pages, no figures. v4: accepted and journal formatted version

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Cited by in corpus (3)

• Hamiltonian multiform description of an integrable hierarchy
• Lagrangian multiforms on coadjoint orbits for finite-dimensional integrable systems
• Semi-discrete Lagrangian 2-forms and the Toda hierarchy