Acoustic Scattering and the Extended Korteweg– de Vries Hierarchy

Abstract The acoustic scattering operator on the real line is mapped to a Schrodinger operator under the Liouville transformation. The potentials in the image are characterized precisely in terms of their scattering data, and the inverse transfor- mation is obtained as a simple, linear quadrature. An existence theorem for the associated Harry Dym flows is proved, using the scattering method. The scattering problem associated with the Camassa–Holm flows on the real line is solved explicitly for a special case, which is used to reduce a general class of such problems to scattering problems on finite intervals.