Discrete moving frames and discrete integrable systems (Q372876)

The authors develop a notion of a discrete moving frame and show it has computational advantages over a single frame for the invariantization of discrete evolution flows and mappings. Group-based moving frames have a wide range of applications, from the classical equivalence problems in differential geometry to more modern applications such as computer vision. Here the authors describe what they call a \textit{discrete group-based moving frame}, which is essentially a sequence of moving frames with overlapping domains. They prove a small set of generators of the algebra of invariants, which they call the discrete Maurer-Cartan invariants, for which there are recursion formulas. The authors show that this offers significant computational advantages over a single moving frame for their study of discrete integrable systems. They prove that the discrete analogues of some curvature flows lead naturally to Hamiltonian pairs, which generate integrable differential-difference systems. In particular, it has been shown that in the centro-affine plane and the projective space, the Hamiltonian pairs obtained can be transformed into the known Hamiltonian pairs for the Toda and modified Volterra lattices, respectively, under Miura transformations. The authors also show that a specified invariant map of polygons in the centro-affine plane can be transformed to the integrable discretization of the Toda Lattice. Moreover, They describe in detail the case of discrete flows in the homogeneous 2-sphere and they obtain realizations of equations of Volterra type as evolutions of polygons on the sphere. The authors conclude with indications of future work.