The geometric nature of the Flaschka transformation (Q525115)

The authors show that the Flaschka map, originally introduced to analyze the dynamics of the integrable Toda lattice system, is the inverse of a momentum map. They discuss the geometrical setting of the map and apply it to generalized Toda lattice systems on semisimple Lie algebras, the rigid body system on Toda orbits, and to coadjoint orbits of semidirect products groups. In addition, the authors develop an infinite-dimensional generalization for the group of area-preserving diffeomorphisms of the annulus and apply it to the analysis of the dispersionless Toda lattice PDE and the solvable rigid body PDE. This paper is organized as follows. Section 1 is an introduction to the subject. Section 2 contains some background material on the cotangent bundle reduction theorem. In Section 3, the authors discuss the Pukanszky condition and its relationship to momentum maps. In Section 4, they derive the momentum map interpretation of the Flaschka transformation. Section 5 deals with the Flaschka transformation for the real splitting and compact real forms of the Toda lattice as well as the solvable rigid body on the Toda orbit space. In Section 6, the authors generalize their results to the infinite-dimensional case by considering the group of area-preserving diffeomorphisms on the annulus and they derive the dispersionless Toda lattice equations and the solvable rigid body PDE. Finally, in Section 7, the authors introduce the Flaschka transformation for certain coadjoint orbits of semidirect products of a Lie group with a vector space and isolate a class of coadjoint orbits that are symplectomorphic to magnetic cotangent bundles.