Diagonalization of the Toda flow for arbitrary isospectral symmetric matrices

Abstract

We construct coordinates on orthogonal conjugacy classes of traceless real symmetric matrices with arbitrary spectrum (the isospectral manifold) that diagonalize the non-periodic Toda vector field. The coordinates, defined on a neighborhood of any diagonal matrix decouple the Toda vector field into a sum of multiples of the Euler vector field in $\mathbb{R}$. The domain of each set of coordinates is dense and their union covers the isospectral manifold. The construction relies on a new matrix factorization which is of independent interest.