Local high-degree polynomial integrals of geodesic flows and the generalized hodograph method

Abstract

We study Riemannian metrics on 2-surfaces with integrable geodesic flows such that an additional first integral is high-degree polynomial in momenta. This problem reduces to searching for solutions to certain quasi-linear systems of PDEs which turn out to be semi-Hamiltonian. We construct plenty of local explicit and implicit integrable examples with polynomial first integrals of degrees 3, 4, 5. Our construction is essentially based on applying the generalized hodograph method.