Computer Assisted Discovery of Integrability via SILO: Sparse Identification of Lax Operators

Abstract

We formulate the discovery of Lax integrability of Hamiltonian dynamical systems as a symbolic regression problem, which, loosely speaking, seeks to maximize the compatibility between a pair of Lax operators and the known Hamiltonian of the dynamical system. Our approach is first tested on the simple harmonic oscillator. We then move on to the Henon-Heiles system, i.e. a two-degree-of-freedom system of nonlinear oscillators. The integrability of the Henon-Heiles system is critically dependent on a set of three parameters within its Hamiltonian, a fact that we leverage to assess the robustness of our approach in detecting the integrability of this system with respect to the parameter dependence of the Hamiltonian. We then adapt our method to canonical examples of Hamiltonian partial differential equations, including the Korteweg-de Vries and cubic nonlinear Schr\"odinger equations, again testing robustness against nonintegrable perturbations of their respective Hamiltonians. In all examples, our approach reliably confirms or denies the integrability of the equations of interest. Moreover, by appropriately adjusting the loss function and applying thresholded $l^0$ regularization to enforce sparsity in the operator weights, we successfully recover accurate forms of the Lax pairs despite wide initial hypotheses on the operators. Some of the relevant Lax pairs, notably for the Henon-Heiles system and the Korteweg-deVries equation, are distinct from the ones that are typically reported in the literature. The Lax pairs that our methodology discovers warrant further mathematical and computational investigation, and we discuss extensively the opportunities for further improvement of SILO as a viable tool for interpretable exploration of integrable Hamiltonian dynamical systems.