The Deift Conjecture: A Program to Construct a Counterexample

Abstract

We describe a program to construct a counterexample to the Deift conjecture, that is, an almost periodic function whose evolution under the KdV equation is not almost periodic in time. The approach is based on a dichotomy found by Volberg and Yuditskii in their solution of the Kotani problem, which states that there exists an analytic condition that distinguishes between almost periodic and non-almost periodic reflectionless potentials with resolvent set given by a Widom domain.