Symmetries and reductions of integrable nonlocal partial differential equations

Abstract

In this paper, symmetry analysis is extended to study nonlocal differential equations, in particular two integrable nonlocal equations, the nonlocal nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation and the nonlocal modified Korteweg--de Vries equation. Lie point symmetries are obtained based on a general theory and used to reduce these equations to nonlocal and local ordinary differential equations separately; namely one symmetry may allow reductions to both nonlocal and local equations depending on how the invariant variables are chosen. For the nonlocal modified Korteweg--de Vries equation, analogously to the local situation, all reduced local equations are integrable. At the end, we also define complex transformations to connect nonlocal differential equations and differential-difference equations.