Nijenhuis geometry IV: conservation laws, symmetries and integration of certain non-diagonalisable systems of hydrodynamic type in quadratures

Abstract

The paper contains two lines of results: the first one is a study of symmetries and conservation laws of gl-regular Nijenhuis operators. We prove the splitting theorem for symmetries and conservation laws of Nijenhuis operators, show that the space of symmetries of a gl-regular Nijenhuis operator forms a commutative algebra with respect to (pointwise) matrix multiplication. Moreover, all the elements of this algebra are strong symmetries of each other. We establish a natural relationship between symmetries and conservation laws of a gl-regular Nijenhuis operator and systems of the first and second companion coordinates. Moreover, we show that the space of conservation laws is naturally related to the space of symmetries in the sense that any conservation laws can be obtained from a single conservation law by multiplication with an appropriate symmetry. In particular, we provide an explicit description of all symmetries and conservation laws for gl-regular operators at algebraically generic points. The second line of results contains an application of the theoretical part to a certain system of partial differential equations of hydrodynamic type, which was previously studied by different authors, but mainly in the diagonalisable case. We show that this system is integrable in quadratures, i.e. its solutions can be found for almost all initial curves by integrating closed 1-forms and solving some systems of functional equations. The system is not diagonalisable in general, and construction and integration of such systems is an actively studied and explicitly stated problem in the literature.