Classical integrability of root-$T\overline{T}$ flows

Abstract

The root-$T\overline{T}$ flow was recently introduced as a universal and classically marginal deformation of any two-dimensional translation-invariant field theory. The flow commutes with the (irrelevant) $T\overline{T}$ flow, and it can be integrated explicitly for a large class of actions, leading to nonanalytic Lagrangians reminiscent of the four-dimensional modified-Maxwell theory (ModMax). It is not a priori obvious whether the root-$T\overline{T}$ flow preserves integrability, as is the case for the $T\overline{T}$ flow. In this paper we demonstrate that this is the case for a large class of classical models by explicitly constructing a deformed Lax connection. We discuss the principal chiral model and the nonlinear sigma models on symmetric and semisymmetric spaces, without or with the Wess-Zumino term. We also construct Lax connections for the two-parameter families of theories deformed by both root-$T\overline{T}$ and $T\overline{T}$ for all of these models.