On the solutions of the second heavenly and Pavlov equations

Abstract

We have recently solved the inverse scattering problem for one-parameter families of vector fields, and used this result to construct the formal solution of the Cauchy problem for a class of integrable nonlinear partial differential equations connected with the commutation of multidimensional vector fields, such as the heavenly equation of Plebanski, the dispersionless Kadomtsev–Petviashvili (dKP) equation and the two-dimensional dispersionless Toda (2ddT) equation, as well as with the commutation of one-dimensional vector fields, such as the Pavlov equation. We also showed that the associated Riemann–Hilbert inverse problems are powerful tools to establish if the solutions of the Cauchy problem break at finite time, to construct their long-time behaviour and characterize classes of implicit solutions. In this paper, using the above theory, we concentrate on the heavenly and Pavlov equations, (i) establishing that their localized solutions evolve without breaking, unlike the cases of dKP and 2ddT; (ii) constructing the long-time behaviour of the solutions of their Cauchy problems; (iii) characterizing a distinguished class of implicit solutions of the heavenly equation.