The modified Camassa-Holm (also called FORQ) equation is one of numerous <i>cousins</i> of the Camassa-Holm equation possessing non-smoth solitons (<i>peakons</i>) as special solutions. The peakon sector of solutions is not uniquely defined: in one peakon sector (dissipative^a) the Sobolev <i>H</i>¹ norm is not preserved, in the other sector (conservative), introduced in [2], the time evolution of peakons leaves the <i>H</i>¹ norm invariant. In this Letter, it is shown that the conservative peakon equations of the modified Camassa-Holm can be given an appropriate Poisson structure relative to which the equations are Hamiltonian and, in fact, Liouville integrable. The latter is proved directly by exploiting the inverse spectral techniques, especially asymptotic analysis of solutions, developed elsewhere [3].

The Novikov equation is an integrable analogue of the CamassaHolm equation with a cubic (rather than quadratic) nonlinear term. Both these equations support a special family of weak solutions called multipeakon solutions. In this paper, an approach involving Pfaffians is applied to study multipeakons of the Novikov equation. First, we show that the Novikov peakon ODEs describe an isospectral flow on the manifold cut out by certain Pfaffian identities. Then, a link between the Novikov peakons and the finite Toda lattice of BKP type (B-Toda lattice) is established based on the use of Pfaffians. Finally, certain generalizations of the Novikov equation and the finite B-Toda lattice are proposed together with special solutions. To our knowledge, it is the first time that the peakon problem is interpreted in terms of Pfaffians.

Many discrete integrable systems exhibit the Laurent phenomenon. In this paper, we investigate three integrable systems: the Somos-4 recurrence, the Somos-5 recurrence, and a system related to so-called A_1 A_1-system, whose general solutions are derived in terms of Hankel determinant. As a result, we directly confirm that they satisfy the Laurent property. Additionally, it is shown that the Somos-5 recurrence can be viewed as a specified Backlund transformation of the Somos-4 recurrence. Related topics about Somos polynomials are also studied.

In this Letter we propose that for Lax integrable nonlinear partial differential equations the natural concept of weak solutions is implied by the compatibility condition for the respective distributional Lax pairs. We illustrate our proposal by comparing two concepts of weak solutions of the modified Camassa-Holm equation pointing out that in the <i>peakon</i> sector (a family of non-smooth solitons) only one of them, namely the one obtained from the distributional compatibility condition, supports the time invariance of the Sobolev <i>H</i>¹ norm.

Motivated by the paper of Beals, Sattinger and Szmigielski (2000) [3], we propose an extension of the CamassaHolm equation, which also admits the multipeakon solutions. The novel aspect is that our approach is mainly based on classic determinant technique. Furthermore, the proposed equation is shown to possess a nonisospectral Lax pair.