Remarks on certain two-component systems with peakon solutions

Abstract

We consider a Lax pair found by Xia, Qiao and Zhou for a family of two-component analogues of the Camassa-Holm equation, including an arbitrary function $H$, and show that this apparent freedom can be removed via a combination of a reciprocal transformation and a gauge transformation, which reduces the system to triangular form. The resulting triangular system may or may not be integrable, depending on the choice of $H$. In addition, we apply the formal series approach of Dubrovin and Zhang to show that scalar equations of Camassa-Holm type with homogeneous nonlinear terms of degree greater than three are not integrable.