Bäcklund transformations for the Jacobi system on an ellipsoid (Q681949)

This paper investigates integrable Hamiltonian systems on the three-axis ellipsoid. The author begins by recalling how Jacobi reduced the problem of solving the equation for geodesics on an ellipsoid to a question of inverting the sums of Abel integrals \[ \int{u_1du_1\over\sqrt{f(u_1)}}+ \int{u_2du_2\over\sqrt{f(u_2)}}= \tau_1,\quad \int{u_1^2 du_1\over\sqrt{f(u_1)}}+ \int {u^2_2 du_2\over\sqrt{f(u_2)}}= \tau_2, \] on a genus-two hyperelliptic curve defined by \(y^2= f(x)\). Weierstrass completed the solution using a change in the time variable to reduce the problem to inversion of the Abel map of the Jacobian map of a genus-two hyperelliptic curve. The author uses Weierstrass' results to construct explicit solutions and to use the Abel map to construct auto-Bäcklund transformations that preserve the canonical form of the Hamiltonian and the Hamilton-Jacobi equations. The system that the author considers is the motion of a point on the surface of an ellipsoid (embedded in the usual way in \(\mathbb{R}^3\)) under the action of the Hooke force. So the Lagrangian of the Jacobi problem is \[ L(q)={1\over 2} \langle\dot q,\dot q\rangle- {\alpha\over 2}\langle q,q\rangle, \] where \(q= (q_1,q_2,q_3)\in \mathbb{R}^3\) and \(\alpha\) is a real parameter. The bulk of the paper describes construction of auto- and hetero-Bäcklund transformations of the system above using the Abel differential equations.