Integrable systems

Publication date 21 April 1997

Soliton equations (35Q51) KdV equations (Korteweg-de Vries equations) (35Q53) NLS equations (nonlinear Schrödinger equations) (35Q55) Completely integrable finite-dimensional Hamiltonian systems, integration methods, integrability tests (37J35) Completely integrable infinite-dimensional Hamiltonian and Lagrangian systems, integration methods, integrability tests, integrable hierarchies (KdV, KP, Toda, etc.) (37K10)

Review text

The paper is a brief survey of the soliton type partial differential equations and their basic properties for beginners. The author describes a history of birth in science of a soliton paradigm that begins with the first observation of solitons by Scott Russel (1834), the first analytical description of solitons by Korteweg and de Vries (1895) and the seminal paper by Zabusky and Kruskal (1965) who coined the word soliton. Then the author gives a list of the most important soliton equations (the Korteweg-de Vries equation, the nonlinear Schrödinger equation, the sine-Gordon equation, the Kadomtsev-Petviashvili equation) and discusses in detail fundamental properties of their one- and many-soliton solutions. The connection of the stability of solitons with the existence of an infinite set of conservation laws of the appropriate differential equation is illustrated on an example of the Korteweg-de Vries equation. The author considers briefly different methods devised to solve soliton equations: the inverse scattering method, the Bäcklund transformation method, the Hirota method. Applications of the soliton equations for a description of some important physical phenomena (such as shallow water waves, dislocations in crystals, the self-focusing of light) are also discussed. For the entire collection see [Zbl 0974.00042].

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