The extended Estabrook–Wahlquist method

Variable Coefficient Korteweg de Vries (vcKdV), modified Korteweg de Vries (vcMKdV), and nonlinear Schrödinger (NLS) equations have a long history dating from their derivation in various applications. A technique based on extended Lax Pairs has been devised recently to derive time-and-space-dependent-coefficient generalizations of various such Lax-integrable NLPDE hierarchies, which are thus more general than almost all cases considered earlier via methods such as the Painlevé Test, Bell Polynomials, and similarity methods.However, this technique, although operationally effective, has the significant disadvantage that, for any integrable system with spatiotemporally varying coefficients, one must ‘guess’ a generalization of the structure of the known Lax Pair for the corresponding system with constant coefficients. Motivated by the somewhat arbitrary nature of the above procedure, we embark in this paper on an attempt to systematize the derivation of Lax-integrable systems with variable coefficients. We consider the Estabrook–Wahlquist (EW) prolongation technique, a relatively self-consistent procedure requiring little prior information. However, this immediately requires that the technique be significantly generalized in several ways, including solving matrix partial differential equations instead of algebraic ones as the structure of the Lax Pair is systematically computed, and also in solving the constraint equations to deduce the explicit forms for various ‘coefficient’ matrices.The new and extended EW technique which results is illustrated by algorithmically deriving generalized Lax-integrable versions of the NLS, generalized fifth-order KdV, MKdV, and derivative nonlinear Schrödinger (DNLS) equations. We also show how this method correctly excludes the existence of a nontrivial Lax pair for a nonintegrable NLPDE such as the variable-coefficient cubic–quintic NLS.