A construction of a large family of commuting pairs of integrable symplectic birational 4-dimensional maps

We give a construction of completely integrable 4-dimensional Hamiltonian systems with cubic Hamilton functions. Applying to the corresponding pairs of commuting quadratic Hamiltonian vector fields the so called Kahan-Hirota-Kimura discretization scheme, we arrive at pairs of birational 4-dimensional maps. We show that these maps are symplectic with respect to a symplectic structure that is a perturbation of the standard symplectic structure on $\mathbb R^4$, and possess two independent integrals of motion, which are perturbations of the original Hamilton functions. Thus, these maps are completely integrable in the Liouville-Arnold sense. Moreover, under a suitable normalization of the original pairs of vector fields, the pairs of maps commute and share the invariant symplectic structure and the two integrals of motion.Comment: 17 p

On well-posedness of variational models of charged drops

Electrified liquids are well known to be prone to a variety of interfacial instabilities that result in the onset of apparent interfacial singularities and liquid fragmentation. In the case of electrically conducting liquids, one of the basic models describing the equilibrium interfacial configurations and the onset of instability assumes the liquid to be equipotential and interprets those configurations as local minimizers of the energy consisting of the sum of the surface energy and the electrostatic energy. Here we show that, surprisingly, this classical geometric variational model is mathematically ill-posed irrespectively of the degree to which the liquid is electrified. Specifically, we demonstrate that an isolated spherical droplet is never a local minimizer, no matter how small is the total charge on the droplet, since the energy can always be lowered by a smooth, arbitrarily small distortion of the droplet's surface. This is in sharp contrast with the experimental observations that a critical amount of charge is needed in order to destabilize a spherical droplet. We discuss several possible regularization mechanisms for the considered free boundary problem and argue that well-posedness can be restored by the inclusion of the entropic effects resulting in finite screening of free charges.Comment: 18 pages, 2 figure

Separation of variables and B\"acklund transformations for the symmetric Lagrange top

We construct the 1- and 2-point integrable maps (B\"acklund transformations) for the symmetric Lagrange top. We show that the Lagrange top has the same algebraic Poisson structure that belongs to the $sl(2)$ Gaudin magnet. The 2-point map leads to a real time-discretization of the continuous flow. Therefore, it provides an integrable numerical scheme for integrating the physical flow. We illustrate the construction by few pictures of the discrete flow calculated in MATLAB.Comment: 19 pages, 2 figures, Matlab progra