Primitive solutions of the Korteweg-de Vries equation (Q2193694)

The authors of this paper survey recent results concerning a new family of solutions, called ``primitive solutions'' of the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation, \[ u_t=6uu_x-u_{xxx}. \] In this differential equation \(u=u(x,t)\) is the unknown function. It is the first equation of an infinite sequence of commuting equations called the KdV hierarchy. The auxiliary linear operator for the KdV hierarchy is the one-dimensional Schrödinger operator defined on the real axis. The primitive solutions are defined as limits of rapidly vanishing solutions of the KdV equation. A primitive solution is determined nonuniquely by three different functions. The first two of them are positive functions on an interval on the imaginary axis. The third one is a function on the real axis determining the reflection coefficient. It is shown that the elliptic one-gap solutions and periodic finite-gap solutions are special cases of reflectionless primitive solutions. The authors study the case of periodic initial data using algebro-geometric finite-gap solutions. Such a solution is determined by a hyperelliptic algebraic curve with real branch points and a divisor on it. It turns out that the solution can be explicitly given by the Matveev-Its formula in terms of the Riemann theta function of the spectral curve. It is known that the periodic finite-gap solutions are dense in the space of all periodic solutions. It is known that periodic finite-gap solutions of the KdV equation can be obtained from \(N\)-soliton solutions in the limit \(N \to \infty \). However, a precise description of such a limit was unknown.