Integrability of the pairing Hamiltonian

We show that a many-body Hamiltonian that corresponds to a system of fermions interacting through a pairing force is an integrable problem, i.e. it has as many constants of the motion as degrees of freedom. At the classical level this implies that the time-dependent Hartree-Fock-Bogoliubov dynamics is integrable and at the quantum level that there are conserved operators of two-body character which reduce to the number operators when the pairing strength vanishes. We display these operators explicitly and study in detail the three-level example. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.