The sixth Painlevé equation as isomonodromy deformation of an irregular system: monodromy data, coalescing eigenvalues, locally holomorphic transcendents and Frobenius manifolds

Abstract

Abstract The sixth Painlevé equation PVI is both the isomonodromy deformation condition of a 2-dimensional isomonodromic Fuchsian system and of a 3-dimensional irregular system. Only the former has been used in the literature to solve the nonlinear connection problem for PVI, through the computation of invariant quantities . We prove a new simple formula expressing the invariants p jk in terms of the Stokes matrices of the irregular system, making the irregular system a concrete alternative for the nonlinear connection problem. We classify the transcendents such that the Stokes matrices and the p jk can be computed in terms of special functions, providing a full non-trivial class of 3-dim. examples such that the theory of non-generic isomonodromy deformations of Cotti et al (2019 Duke Math. J. 168 967–1108) applies. A sub-class of these transcendents realises the local structure of all the 3-dim Dubrovin–Frobenius manifolds with semisimple coalescence points of the type studied in Cotti et al (2020 SIGMA 16 105). We compute all the monodromy data for these manifolds (Stokes matrix, Levelt exponents and central connection matrix).