## Lax Pairs for Linear PDEs

### Remember to vote up questions/answers you find interesting or helpful (requires 15 reputation points)

I'm trying to understand the discussion around equation (2.1) of the paper http://www.jstor.org/stable/53053. It says that the linear PDE $M(\partial_x,\partial_y)q=0$ with constant coefficients has the Lax pair $\mu_x+ik\mu=q$ and $M(\partial_x,\partial_y)\mu=0$, where k is any complex number and $\mu$ is a function.

The way I'm used to thinking of Lax pairs is as operators $L$ and $B$ such that $\dot{L}+[L,B]=0$ is equivalent to the original PDE. This is equivalent to requiring that the equations $L\phi=\lambda\phi$ and $\dot{\phi}=B\phi$ are compatible, where $\lambda$ is a fixed eigenvalue and $\phi$ is any function. Can anyone explain how this connects with the discussion in the paper? What are $L$ and $B$ in the above case?

Thanks!

-
{"extraction_info": {"found_math": true, "script_math_tex": 0, "script_math_asciimath": 0, "math_annotations": 0, "math_alttext": 0, "mathml": 0, "mathjax_tag": 0, "mathjax_inline_tex": 13, "mathjax_display_tex": 0, "mathjax_asciimath": 0, "img_math": 0, "codecogs_latex": 0, "wp_latex": 0, "mimetex.cgi": 0, "/images/math/codecogs": 0, "mathtex.cgi": 0}, "config": {"markdown_headings": true, "markdown_code": true, "boilerplate_config": {"ratio_threshold": 0.18, "absolute_threshold": 20, "end_threshold": 15, "enable": true}, "remove_buttons": true, "remove_image_figures": true, "remove_link_clusters": true, "table_config": {"min_rows": 2, "min_cols": 3, "format": "github"}, "remove_chinese": true, "remove_edit_buttons": true, "extract_latex": true}, "english_confidence": 0.9463929533958435, "perplexity_flag": "head"}