A solvable many-body problem in the plane (Q4498233)

Integrable systems are highly non-generic, but interesting in many ways, both in themselves and as a starting point for the study of non-integrable ones. For a long time the list of known integrable systems reduced to a few classical ones (harmonic oscillators, Kepler problem with one planet, Kovalevskaya top,\dots), until in the late sixties/early seventies a new bunch of integrable systems -- finite and infinite-dimensional -- was discovered: soliton equations, Toda lattice, and the Calogero system. The study of integrable systems uncovered relations with different branches of mathematics, and proved to be one of the most fertile areas of research in the last decades. Most of the known integrable systems are one-dimensional: so most soliton equations are one-dimensional in space, and most integrable systems of interacting particles require the particle to live in a one-dimensional space (line or circle). Thus, beside the interest inherent to any new integrable system, it is specially interesting to determine truly higher-dimensional ones. A number of interacting and/or solvable systems of \(n\) particles (with \(n\) arbitrary) in the plane have been identified by Calogero in recent works (some of these also quoted here), and here a class of such systems is identified. These, in the case of \(n\) particles, depend on a large number \((2n^2)\) of free parameters. If \(r_i=(x_i,y_i)\) is the position of the \(i\)-th particle in the plane, \(r^2_i \equiv |r_i |^2\), \(E\) is the identity operator, and the operator \(Y\) acts on two-vectors as \(Y(x,y)=(-y,x)\), these systems are defined by the second-order equations \[ \begin{multlined} \ddot r_i= (\lambda E+\omega Y)\dot r_i+{2\dot r_i( \dot r_i\cdot r_i)- r_i(\dot r_i\cdot \dot r_i)\over r^2_i}+\\ \sum^n_{k=1} \bigl[ \beta_{ik} (t)E+\gamma_{ik} (t)Y\bigr] {\dot r_k(r_k \cdot r_i)+r_i(\dot r_k \cdot r_k) -r_k(\dot r_k \cdot r_i)\over r^2_k},\end{multlined} \] where \(\beta_{ik}(t)= [(a_{i k}\cos(\omega t)- b_{ik}\sin (\omega t)] \exp(\lambda t)\) and \(\gamma_{i k} (t)= [(b_{ik} \cos(\omega t)+a_{ik} \sin(\omega t)]\exp (\lambda t)\). These \(a_{ik}\) and \(b_{ik}\) are arbitrary real constants, i.e. the above-mentioned \(2n^2\) free parameters. For \(\lambda=0\) this gives models all of whose solutions are periodic. It is also shown how to generalize this class of (rotationally and scale invariant) integrable models to produce translationally invariant classes.