A new class of solutions to Laplacian growth with zero surface tension is presented and shown to contain all other known solutions as special or limiting cases. These solutions, which are time-dependent conformal maps with branch cuts inside the unit circle, are governed by a nonlinear integral equation and describe oil fjords with non-parallel walls in viscous fingering experiments in Hele-Shaw cells. Integrals of motion for the multi-cut Laplacian growth solutions in terms of singularities of the Schwarz function are found, and the dynamics of densities (jumps) on the cuts are derived. The subclass of these solutions with linear Cauchy densities on the cuts of the Schwarz function is of particular interest, because in this case the integral equation for the conformal map becomes linear. These solutions can also be of physical importance by representing oil/air interfaces, which form oil fjords with a constant opening angle, in accordance with recent experiments in a Hele-shaw cell.
A fat slit is a compact domain in the upper half plane bounded by a curve with endpoints on the real axis and a segment of the real axis between them. We consider conformal maps of the upper half plane to the exterior of a fat slit parameterized by harmonic moments of the latter and show that they obey an infinite set of Lax equations for the dispersionless KP hierarchy. Deformation of a fat slit under changing a particular harmonic moment can be treated as a growth process similar to the Laplacian growth of domains in the whole plane. This construction extends the well known link between solutions to the dispersionless KP hierarchy and conformal maps of slit domains in the upper half plane and provides a new, large family of solutions.
We consider GL(K|M)-invariant integrable supersymmetric spin chains with twisted boundary conditions and elucidate the role of Backlund transformations in solving the difference Hirota equation for eigenvalues of their transfer matrices. The nested Bethe ansatz technique is shown to be equivalent to a chain of successive Backlund transformations undressing the original problem to a trivial one.
