The Constrained KP Hierarchy and the Generalised Miura Transformation

Abstract

Recently much attention has been paid to the restriction of KP to the submanifold of operators which can be represented as a ratio of two purely differential operators L=AB^{-1}. Whereas most of the aspects concerning this reduced hierarchy, like the Lax flows and the Hamiltonians, are by now well understood, there still lacks a clear and conclusive statement about the associated Poisson structure. We fill this gap by placing the problem in a more general framework and then showing how the required result follows from an interesting property of the second Gelfand-Dickey brackets under multiplication and inversion of Lax operators. As a byproduct we give an elegant and simple proof of the generalised Kupershmidt-Wilson theorem.