Poisson Actions and Scattering Theory for Integrable Systems
Abstract
Conservation laws, heirarchies, scattering theory and Bäcklund transformations are known to be the building blocks of integrable partial differential equations. We identify these as facets of a theory of Poisson group actions, and apply the theory to the ZS-AKNS nxn heirarchy (which includes the non-linear Schrödinger equation, modified KdV, and the n-wave equation). We also discuss a number of applications in geometry, including the sine-Gordon equation, harmonic maps, Schrödinger flows on Hermitian symmetric spaces, Darboux orthogonal coordinates, and isometric immerisons of one space form in another.