A quadric ansatz method for a certain class of second order PDEs

Abstract

We develop a procedure to implement the method of quadric ansatz to a class of second order partial differential equations (PDEs), which includes the four-dimensional Kähler-Einstein equation with symmetry and the one-sided type-D Einstein equation with nonzero scalar curvature. The procedure, which reduces the PDEs to ordinary differential equations (ODEs), involves imposing additional constraints to the form of the ansatz, depending on the exact form of the PDEs. Thus its applicability varies within the class. We identify applicable subclasses of a class of modified Toda equations, one of which includes the Kähler-Einstein equation with symmetry, and give the corresponding reduced ODEs. In addition, we obtain a quadric ansatz reduction for a family of Einstein-Weyl equations in arbitrary dimensions. Lastly, we suggest a particular form of equations for which our procedure appears to be most effective as the aforementioned constraints vanish, and also present some reduction results using another type of ansatz, namely the hyperplane ansatz.