Koopman analysis of the periodic Korteweg–de Vries equation

The eigenspectrum of the Koopman operator enables the decomposition of nonlinear dynamics into a sum of nonlinear functions of the state space with purely exponential and sinusoidal time dependence. For a limited number of dynamical systems, it is possible to find these Koopman eigenfunctions exactly and analytically. Here, this is done for the Korteweg–de Vries equation on a periodic interval using the periodic inverse scattering transform and some concepts of algebraic geometry. To the authors’ knowledge, this is the first complete Koopman analysis of a partial differential equation, which does not have a trivial global attractor. The results are shown to match the frequencies computed by the data-driven method of dynamic mode decomposition (DMD). We demonstrate that in general, DMD gives a large number of eigenvalues near the imaginary axis and show how these should be interpreted in this setting.