Open intersection numbers and the wave function of the KdV hierarchy

Abstract

Recently R. Pandharipande, J. Solomon and R. Tessler initiated a study of the intersection theory on the moduli space of Riemann surfaces with boundary. They conjectured that the generating series of the intersection numbers is a specific solution of a system of PDEs, that they called the open KdV equations. In this paper we show that the open KdV equations are closely related to the equations for the wave function of the KdV hierarchy. This allows us to give an explicit formula for the specific solution in terms of Witten's generating series of the intersection numbers on the moduli space of stable curves.