Sharp well-posedness for the Benjamin–Ono equation

The Benjamin–Ono equation is shown to be well-posed, both on the line and on the circle, in the Sobolev spaces Hs\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$H^{s}$\end{document} for s>−12\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$s>-\tfrac{1}{2}$\end{document}. The proof rests on a new gauge transformation and benefits from our introduction of a modified Lax pair representation of the full hierarchy. As we will show, these developments yield important additional dividends beyond well-posedness, including (i) the unification of the diverse approaches to polynomial conservation laws; (ii) a generalization of Gérard’s explicit formula to the full hierarchy; and (iii) new virial-type identities covering all equations in the hierarchy.