Symmetries and reductions of integrable nonlocal partial differential equations (1904.01854v2)

Abstract: In this paper, symmetry analysis is extended to study nonlocal differential equations, in particular two integrable nonlocal equations, the nonlocal nonlinear Schr\"odinger equation and the nonlocal modified Korteweg--de Vries equation. Lie point symmetries are obtained based on a general theory and used to reduce these equations to nonlocal and local ordinary differential equations separately; namely one symmetry may allow reductions to both nonlocal and local equations depending on how the invariant variables are chosen. For the nonlocal modified Korteweg--de Vries equation, analogously to the local situation, all reduced local equations are integrable. At the end, we also define complex transformations to connect nonlocal differential equations and differential-difference equations.