Multidimensional integrable systems from contact geometry

Abstract

Upon having presented a bird's eye view of history of integrable systems, we give a brief review of certain earlier advances (arXiv:1401.2122 & arXiv:1812.02263) in the longstanding problem of search for partial differential systems in four independent variables, often referred to as (3+1)-dimensional or 4D systems, that are integrable in the sense of soliton theory. Namely, we review a recent construction for a large new class of (3+1)-dimensional integrable systems with Lax pairs involving contact vector fields. This class contains inter alia two infinite families of such systems, thus establishing that there is significantly more integrable (3+1)-dimensional systems than it was believed for a long time. In fact, the construction under study yields (3+1)-dimensional integrable generalizations of many well-known dispersionless integrable (2+1)-dimensional systems like the dispersionless KP equation, as well as a first example of a (3+1)-dimensional integrable system with an algebraic, rather than rational, nonisospectral Lax pair. To demonstrate the versatility of the construction in question, we employ it here to produce novel integrable (3+1)-dimensional generalizations for the following (2+1)-dimensional integrable systems: dispersionless BKP, dispersionless asymmetric Nizhnik--Veselov--Novikov, dispersionless Gardner, and dispersionless modified KP equations, and the generalized Benney system.

arXiv comment9 pages, no figures, formatting differs from the published version etc (see the text for details), in v2 some PDF formatting issues were fixed

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Cited by in corpus (2)

• Contact Lie systems on Riemannian and Lorentzian spaces: from scaling symmetries to curvature-dependent reductions
• Hidden symmetries, hidden conservation laws and exact solutions of dispersionless Nyzhnyk equation