Residual Symmetry Reductions and Painlevé Solitons

Abstract

This letter introduces the novel concept of Painlevé solitons -- waves arising from the interaction between Painlevé waves and solitons in integrable systems. Painlevé solitons may also be viewed as solitons propagating against a Painlevé wave background, in analogy with the established notion of elliptic solitons, which refer to solitons on an elliptic wave background. By employing a novel symmetry decomposition method aided by nonlocal residual symmetries, we explicitly construct (extended) Painlevé II solitons for the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation and (extended) Painlevé IV solitons for the Boussinesq equation.