Quadrature for the generalized hydrodynamics equation and absence of shocks in the Lieb-Liniger model

In conventional fluids, it is well known that Euler-scale equations are plagued by ambiguiti es and instabilities. In one dimension smooth initial conditions may develop shocks, and weak solutions, such as for domain wall initial conditions (the paradigmatic Riemann problem of hydrodynamics), are not unique (and must be supplemented by physically motivated conditions such as non-negative entropy production). The absence of shock formation experimentally observed in quasi-one-dimensional cold-atomic gases, which are described by the Lieb-Liniger model, provides perhaps the strongest pointer to a modification of the hydrodynamic equation due to integrability. Generalized hydrodynamics (GHD) is the required hydrodynamic theory, taking into account the infinite number of conserved quantities afforded by integrability. We provide a new quadrature for the GHD equation—a solution in terms of a Banach fixed-point problem where time has been explicitly integrated. The quadrature is an efficient numerical solution tool; and it allows us, in the Lieb-Liniger model, to rigorously show that no shock may appear at all times, and, when combined with recent hydrodynamic fluctuation theories, to obtain new expressions for correlations in nonstationary states, establishing for the first time the presence of discontinuities that are fundamental to the nonequilibrium physics of integrable systems.