Jacobi structures of evolutionary partial differential equations (Q531789)

The authors introduce the notion of infinite-dimensional Jacobi structures which provides a geometrical characterization of an important class of Hamiltonian structures. The invariance of the space of Jacobi structures under reciprocal transformations enables them to study normal forms of Jacobi structures under Miura type transformations and reciprocal transformations, and to discover possibly hidden relations between some important evolutionary PDEs via the study of their local and nonlocal Hamiltonian structures. The normal form of a Jacobi structure with leading term of hydrodynamic type is obtained by computing the associated Lichnerowicz-Jacobi cohomologies. From the point of view of integrable evolutionary PDEs, the next important task is the classification of bi-Jacobi structures with leading terms of hydrodynamic type. Under certain appropriate conditions it is shown that the evolutionary PDE which has a bi-Jacobi structure possesses an infinite number of commuting flows and conservation laws. Thus, bi-Jacobi structures just like bi-Hamiltonian structures are closely related to integrable evolutionary PDEs. To classify bi-Jacobi structures of hydrodynamic type, one must classify first their leading terms, i.e., pairs of conformally flat metrics, which is a pure differential geometric problem; then, the classification problem becomes a deformation problem, which is controlled by some bi-Jacobi cohomologies. The computation of these bi-Jacobi cohomologies is highly nontrivial, new techniques are expected. The notion of Jacobi structures defined in this article is only for \(1+1\) dimensional evolutionary PDEs. However, for the generalization of it to higher spatial dimensional cases one only has to replace the used jet space by more general jet spaces. Some results still hold, but some do not, where many open problems arise.