Topological recursion with hard edges

Abstract

We prove a Givental type decomposition for partition functions that arise out of topological recursion applied to spectral curves. Copies of the Konstevich–Witten KdV tau function arise out of regular spectral curves and copies of the Brezin–Gross–Witten KdV tau function arise out of irregular spectral curves. We present the example of this decomposition for the matrix model with two hard edges and spectral curve [Formula: see text].