Rational Solutions of Riccati-like Partial Differential Equations

When factoring linear partial differential systems with a finite-dimensional solution space or analysing symmetries of nonlinear ODEs, we need to look for rational solutions of certain nonlinear PDEs. The nonlinear PDEs are called Riccati-like because they arise in a similar way as Riccati ODEs. In this paper we describe the structure of rational solutions of a Riccati-like system, and an algorithm for computing them. The algorithm is also applicable to finding all rational solutions of Lie’s system { ∂_xu + u² + a₁u + a₂v + a₃, ∂_yu + uv + b₁u + b₂v + b₃, ∂_xv + uv + c₁u + c₂v + c₃, ∂_yv + v² + d₁u + d₂v + d₃},where a₁, . . . , d₃are rational functions of x and y.