On Poisson structures of hydrodynamic type and their deformations

Systems of quasilinear partial differential equations of the first order, known as hydrodynamic type systems, are one of the most important classes of nonlinear partial differential equations in the modern theory of integrable systems. They naturally arise in continuum mechanics and in a wide range of applications, both in pure and applied mathematics. Deep connections between the mathematical theory of hydrodynamic type systems with differential geometry, firstly revealed by Riemann in the nineteenth century, have been thoroughly investigated in the eighties by Dubrovin and Novikov. They introduced and studied a class of Poisson structures generated by a flat pseudo-Riemannian metric, called first-order Poisson brackets of hydrodynamic type. Subsequently, these structures have been generalised in a whole variety of different ways: degenerate, non-homogeneous, higher order, multi-dimensional, and non-local. The first part of this thesis is devoted to the classification of such structures in two dimensions, both non-degenerate and degenerate. Complete lists of such structures are provided for a small number of components, as well as partial results in the multi-component non-degenerate case. In the second part of the thesis we deal with deformations of Poisson structures of hydrodynamic type. The deformation theory of Poisson structures is of great interest in the theory of integrable systems, and also plays a key role in the theory of Frobenius manifolds. In particular, we investigate deformations of two classes of structures of hydrodynamic type: degenerate one-dimensional Poisson brackets and non-semisimple bi-Hamiltonian structures associated with Balinskii-Novikov algebras. Complete classification of second-order deformations are presented for two-component structures.