Einstein-Weyl geometry, the dKP equation and twistor theory (Q5927606)

The authors study the Einstein-Weyl (EW) equations in relation to integrable systems, and in particular the dispersionless Kadomtsev-Petviashvili (dKP) equation. They construct and characterise a class of new EW structures in \(2+1\) dimensions out of solutions to the dKP equation. As a result they show that the dKP solutions give rise to hyper-Kähler metrics in four dimensions. Moreover they construct some new examples of EW structures and obtain all solutions of the dKP equation with the property that the associated EW space admits a family of divergence-free, shear-free geodesic congruences. These solutions give rise to new EW metrics depending on the arbitrary function of one variable.