Spheres, Kahler geometry and the Hunter-Saxton system

Many important equations of mathematical physics arise geometrically as geodesic equations on Lie groups. In this paper, we study an example of a geodesic equation, the two-component Hunter-Saxton (2HS) system, which displays a number of unique geometric features. We show that 2HS describes the geodesic flow on a manifold, which is isometric to a subset of a sphere. Since the geodesics on a sphere are simply the great circles, this immediately yields explicit formulae for the solutions of 2HS. We also show that when restricted to functions of zero mean, 2HS reduces to the geodesic equation on an infinite-dimensional manifold, which admits a Kahler structure. We demonstrate that this manifold is in fact isometric to a subset of complex projective space, and that the above constructions provide an example of an infinite-dimensional Hopf fibration.