The equation of the Van der Pol oscillator, being characterized by a dissipative term, is non-Lagrangian. Appending an additional degree of freedom we bring the equation in the frame of action principle and thus introduce a one-way coupled system. As with the Van der Pol oscillator, the coupled system also involves only one parameter that controls the dynamics. The response system is described by a linear differential equation coupled nonlinearly to the drive system. In the linear approximation the equations of our coupled system coincide with those of the Bateman dual system (a pair of damped and anti-damped harmonic oscillators). The critical point of damped and anti-damped oscillators are stable and unstable for all physical values of the frictional coefficient $mu$. Contrarily, the critical points of the drive- (Van der Pol) and response systems depend crucially on the values of $mu$. These points are unstable for $mu > 0$ while the critical point of the drive system is stable and that of the response system is unstable for $mu < 0$. The one-way coupled system exhibits bifurcations which are different from those of the uncoupled Van der Pol oscillator. Our system is chaotic and we observe phase synchronization in the regime of dynamic chaos only for small values of $mu$.
We consider equations in the modified KdV (mKdV) hierarchy and make use of the Miura transformation to construct expressions for their Lax pair. We derive a Lagrangian-based approach to study the bi-Hamiltonian structure of the mKdV equations. We also show that the complex modified KdV (cmKdV) equation follows from the action principle to have a Lagrangian representation. This representation not only provides a basis to write the cmKdV equation in the canonical form endowed with an appropriate Poisson structure but also help us construct a semianalytical solution of it. The solution obtained by us may serve as a useful guide for purely numerical routines which are currently being used to solve the cmKdV eqution.
We derive a Lagrangian based approach to study the compatible Hamiltonian structure of the dispersionless KdV and supersymmetric KdV hierarchies and claim that our treatment of the problem serves as a very useful supplement of the so-called r-matrix method. We suggest specific ways to construct results for conserved densities and Hamiltonian operators. The Lagrangian formulation, via Noethers theorem, provides a method to make the relation between symmetries and conserved quantities more precise. We have exploited this fact to study the variational symmetries of the dispersionless KdV equation.
