Bihamiltonian cohomologies and integrable hierarchies. II: The tau structures (Q1664319)

The authors study integrable hierarchies of evolutionary PDEs associated with semisimple bi-Hamiltonian structures of hydrodynamic type and their deformations. The authors introduce a particular class of semisimple bi-Hamiltonian structures of hydrodynamic type called flat exact semisimple bi-Hamiltonian structures of hydrodynamic type. They show that the corresponding integrable hierarchies of hydrodynamic type admit the so-called tau structures, i.e., one can construct tau functions for those PDEs and thus integrate them. As it is pointed out in the paper, flat exact semisimple bi-Hamiltonian structures of hydrodynamic type are deeply related to Frobenius manifold structures. Another important issue extensively discussed in the paper concerns deformations of the bi-Hamiltonian structures of the above mentioned class. The authors prove that deformations with constant central invariants lead to integrable hierarchies admitting tau structures and any two deformations with the same invariants give rise to hierarchies whose tau functions have logarithms differing by a differential polynomial. This result contributes to the classification of deformations of bi-Hamiltonian structures of hydrodynamic type preserving the tau structure existence property.