Geometric Integrability of the Camassa–Holm Equation. II

It is known that the Camassa–Holm (CH) equation describes pseudo-spherical surfaces and that therefore its integrability properties can be studied by geometrical means. In particular, the CH equation admits nonlocal symmetries of “pseudo-potential type”: the standard quadratic pseudo-potential associated with the geodesics of the pseudo-spherical surfaces determined by (generic) solutions to CH, allows us to construct a covering π of the equation manifold of CH on which nonlocal symmetries can be explicitly calculated. In this article, we present the Lie algebra of (first-order) nonlocal π-symmetries for the CH equation, and we show that this algebra contains a semidirect sum of the loop algebra over sl(2,R) and the centerless Virasoro algebra. As applications, we compute explicit solutions, we construct a Darboux transformation for the CH equation, and we recover its recursion operator. We also extend our results to the associated Camassa–Holm equation introduced by J. Schiff.