Weakly nonlocal Poisson brackets, Schouten brackets and supermanifolds

Abstract

Poisson brackets between conserved quantities are a fundamental tool in the theory of integrable systems. The subclass of weakly nonlocal Poisson brackets occurs in many significant integrable systems. Proving that a weakly nonlocal differential operator defines a Poisson bracket can be challenging. We propose a computational approach to this problem through the identification of such operators with superfunctions on supermanifolds.