Amari-Chentsov connections and their geodesics on homogeneous spaces of diffeomorphism groups (Q744536)

Let \(M\) be a compact Riemannian manifold without boundary. Let \(\mathcal{D}(M)\) denote the group of smooth diffeomorphisms of \(M\) and let \(\mathcal{D}_\mu(M)\) be its subgroup of diffeomorphisms preserving the volume form \(\mu\) on \(M\). The homogeneous space \(\mathcal{D}(M)/\mathcal{D}_\mu(M)\) can be naturally identified with the set of smooth probability densities, i.e., smooth functions \(\rho >0\) on \(M\) satisfying the condition \(\int_M \rho \, d\mu = 1\). In this paper the authors consider analogues of the so-called \(\alpha\)-connections on \(\mathcal{D}(M)/\mathcal{D}_\mu(M)\) introduced in geometric statistics by Chentsov and Amari. The purposes of this paper are to provide a proof of the construction in [\textit{B. A. Khesin} et al., Geom. Funct. Anal. 23, No. 1, 334--366 (2013; Zbl 1275.58006)] of Amari-Chentsov connections for circle diffeomorphisms, to generalize this construction to diffeomorphism groups of higher-dimensional manifolds and finally, as a by-product, to show integrability of the geodesic equations corresponding to \(\alpha=1\). The affine connection \(\nabla^{(\alpha)}\) given for a right-invariant vector field \(W_\eta = w \circ \eta\) and a tangent vector \(V = v \circ \eta\) is given by \[ ( \nabla^{(\alpha)}_V W)_\eta = -\left\{ \Delta^{-1}d \Bigl( d\,\mathrm{div}\, w \cdot v + \frac{1-\alpha}{2}\,\mathrm{div}\,{w} \,\mathrm{div}\,{v} \Bigr) \right\}^\sharp \circ \eta\, \] where \(\alpha \in [-1, 1]\) and \(\Delta = d\delta + \delta d\) denotes the Laplace-de Rham operator. In this paper the authors prove, that for any \(\alpha\) the connections \(\nabla^{(\alpha)}\) and \(\nabla^{(-\alpha)}\) are dual with respect to the \(\dot{H}^1\) metric and \(\nabla^{(0)}\) is the Levi-Civita connection. The geodesic equation of \(\nabla^{(\alpha)}\) on \(\mathcal{D}(M)/\mathcal{D}_\mu(M)\) is equivalent to the following nonlinear PDE \[ d\varphi_t + d\iota_{\displaystyle u} d\varphi + (1-\alpha) \varphi \, d\varphi = 0, \qquad \varphi = \mathrm{div}\, u. \] The geodesic equations of \(\nabla^{(\alpha)}\) on \(\mathcal{D}(M)/\mathcal{D}_\mu(M)\) with \(\alpha =0, \pm 1\) are integrable equations in any dimension \(n\).