Peakons

Abstract

The peakons discussed here are singular solutions of the dispersionless Camassa-Holm (CH) shallow water wave equation in one spatial dimension. These are reviewed in the context of asymptotic expansions and Euler-Poincar\'e variational principles. The dispersionless CH equation generalizes to the EPDiff equation, whose singular solutions are peakon wave fronts in higher dimensions. The reduction of these singular solutions of CH and EPDiff to canonical Hamiltonian dynamics on lower dimensional sets may be understood, by realizing that their solution ansatz is a momentum map, and momentum maps are Poisson.