A cohomological approach to immersed submanifolds via integrable systems

Abstract

A geometric approach to immersion formulas for soliton surfaces is provided through new cohomologies on spaces of special types of $\mathfrak{g}$-valued differential forms. This leads us to introduce Poincar\'e-type lemmas for these cohomologies, which appropriately describe the integrability conditions of Lax pairs associated with systems of PDEs. Our methods clarify the structure and properties of the deformations and soliton surfaces for the aforesaid Lax pairs. Our findings also allow for the generalization of the theory of soliton surfaces in Lie algebras to general soliton submanifolds. Techniques from the theory of infinite-dimensional jet manifolds and diffieties enable us to justify certain common assumptions of the theory of soliton surfaces. Theoretical results are illustrated through $\mathbb{C}P^{N-1}$ sigma models.