Deformations of the KdV hierarchy and related soliton equations

Abstract

We define hierarchies of differential--q-difference equations, which are q-deformations of the equations of the generalized KdV hierarchies. We show that these hierarchies are bihamiltonian, one of the hamiltonian structures being that of the q-deformed classical W-algebra of sl(N), defined by Reshetikhin and the author. We also find q-deformations of the mKdV hierarchies and the affine Toda equations.