Geodesic flows and Neumann systems on Stiefel varieties: geometry and integrability (Q415489)

The first part of this paper is devoted to geodesic flows on the Stiefel manifolds, studied by using the Dirac approach and the corresponding Poisson structure. For various examples of integrable flows, the dimension of invariant isotropic tori is computed and matrix Lax representations are provided. The second part considers integrable Neumann flows on the Stiefel manifold and the oriented Grassmannian manifold, generalizing the famous Neumann system on the sphere \(S^{n-1}\). A detailed proof of the non-commutative integrability for the considered Neumann flows is obtained through a completeness condition for a set of Casimir functions on a pencil of compatible Poisson brackets.