Whitham systems and deformations

Abstract

We consider the deformations of Whitham systems including the "dispersion terms" and having the form of Dubrovin-Zhang deformations of Frobenius manifolds. The procedure is connected with B.A. Dubrovin problem of deformations of Frobenius manifolds corresponding to the Whitham systems of integrable hierarchies. Under some non-degeneracy requirements we suggest a general scheme of the deformation of the hyperbolic Whitham systems using the initial non-linear system. The general form of the deformed Whitham system coincides with the form of the "low-dispersion" asymptotic expansions used by B.A. Dubrovin and Y. Zhang in the theory of deformations of Frobenius manifolds.