Symmetries,Conservation Laws,and Noether's Theorem for Differential‐Difference Equations

This paper mainly contributes to the extension of Noether's theorem to differential‐difference equations. For this purpose, we first investigate the prolongation formula for continuous symmetries, which makes a characteristic representation possible. The relations of symmetries, conservation laws, and the Fréchet derivative are also investigated. For nonvariational equations, because Noether's theorem is now available, the self‐adjointness method is adapted to the computation of conservation laws for differential‐difference equations. Several differential‐difference equations are investigated as illustrative examples, including the Toda lattice and semidiscretizations of the Korteweg–de Vries (KdV) equation. In particular, the Volterra equation is taken as a running example.