A variational principle for discrete integrable systems (Q1749894)

For integrable systems in the sense of multidimensional consistency (MDC) one can consider the Lagrangian as a form, which is closed on solutions of the equations of motion. For 2-dimensional systems, described by partial difference equations with two independent variables, MDC allows the authors to define an action on arbitrary 2-dimensional surfaces embedded in a higher dimensional space of independent variables, where the action is not only a functional of the field variables but also the choice of surface. It is then natural to propose that the system should be derived from a variational principle which includes not only variations with respect to the dependent variables, but also with respect to variations of the surface in the space of independent variables. In this paper, the authors derive the resulting system of generalized Euler-Lagrange equations arising from that principle. They treat the case where the equations are 2 dimensional (but which due to MDC can be consistently embedded in higher-dimensional space), and show that they can be integrated to yield relations of quadrilateral type. They also derive the extended set of Euler-Lagrange equations for 3-dimensional systems, i.e., those for equations with 3 independent variables. The emerging point of view from this study is that the variational principle can be considered as the set of equations not only encoding the equations of motion but as the defining equations for the Lagrangians themselves. This paper is organized as follows: the first section is an introduction to the subject. In Section 2, the authors examine the variational principle for 2-dimensional discrete systems; defining the action, deriving the set of extended EL equations for the basic configurations of the surface, and performing the analysis of the Euler-Lagrange equations to yield the quad equations. They present the examples of the H1 and H3 quad equations, cf. [\textit{V. E. Adler} et al., Commun. Math. Phys. 233, No. 3, 513--543 (2003; Zbl 1075.37022)], as illustrations, and furthermore show that in the case of quadratic Lagrangians the analysis yields a unique parameter class of Lagrangians corresponding to a linear quad equation possessing the MDC property. In Section 3, they give the defining set of EL equations for 3-dimensional discrete systems, and show that these are compatible with the bilinear discrete Kadomtsev-Petviashvili (KP) equation. Section 4 provides some further discussion and perspectives.