Singular fiber of the Mumford system and rational solutions to the KdV hierarchy

Abstract

We study the singular iso-level manifold $M_g(0)$ of the genus $g$ Mumford system associated to the spectral curve $y^2=x^{2g+1}$. We show that $M_g(0)$ is stratified by $g+1$ open subvarieties of additive algebraic groups of dimension $0,1,...,g$ and we give an explicit description of $M_g(0)$ in terms of the compactification of the generalized Jacobian. As a consequence, we obtain an effective algorithm to compute rational solutions to the genus $g$ Mumford system, which is closely related to rational solutions of the KdV hierarchy.