Momentum Maps and Measure-valued Solutions (Peakons, Filaments and Sheets) for the EPDiff Equation

Abstract

We study the dynamics of measure-valued solutions of what we call the EPDiff equations, standing for the {\it Euler-Poincaré equations associated with the diffeomorphism group (of $\mathbb{R}^n$ or an $n$-dimensional manifold $M$)}. Our main focus will be on the case of quadratic Lagrangians; that is, on geodesic motion on the diffeomorphism group with respect to the right invariant Sobolev $H^1$ metric. The corresponding Euler-Poincaré (EP) equations are the EPDiff equations, which coincide with the averaged template matching equations (ATME) from computer vision and agree with the Camassa-Holm (CH) equations in one dimension. The corresponding equations for the volume preserving diffeomorphism group are the well-known LAE (Lagrangian averaged Euler) equations for incompressible fluids. We first show that the EPDiff equations are generated by a smooth vector field on the diffeomorphism group for sufficiently smooth solutions. This is analogous to known results for incompressible fluids--both the Euler equations and the LAE equations--and it shows that for sufficiently smooth solutions, the equations are well-posed for short time. In fact, numerical evidence suggests that, as time progresses, these smooth solutions break up into singular solutions which, at least in one dimension, exhibit soliton behavior. With regard to these non-smooth solutions, we study measure-valued solutions that generalize to higher dimensions the peakon solutions of the (CH) equation in one dimension. One of the main purposes of this paper is to show that many of the properties of these measure-valued solutions may be understood through the fact that their solution ansatz is a momentum map. Some additional geometry is also pointed out, for example, that this momentum map is one leg of a natural dual pair.