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

Abstract

We consider a 3-dimensional Pfaffian system, whose z-component is a differential system with irregular singularity at infinity and Fuchsian at zero. In the first part of the paper, we prove that its Frobenius integrability is equivalent to the sixth Painlev\'e equation PVI. The coefficients of the system will be explicitly written in terms of the solutions of PVI. In this way, we remake a result of [44, 61]. We then express in terms of the Stokes matrices of the 3x3 irregular system the monodromy invariants p_{jk}=Tr(M_jM_k) of the 2-dimensional isomonodromic Fuchsian system with four singularities, traditionally associated to PVI [23, 55] and used to solve the non-linear connection problem. Several years after [44, 61], the authors of [14] showed that the computation of the monodromy data of a class of irregular systems may be facilitated in case of coalescing eigenvalues. This coalescence corresponds to the critical points (fixed singularities) of PVI. In the second part of the paper, we classify the branches of PVI transcendents holomorphic at a critical point such that the analyticity and semisimplicity properties described in [14] are satisfied, and we compute the associated Stokes matrices and the invariants p_{jk}. Finally, we compute the monodromy data parametrizing the chamber of a 3-dim Dubrovin-Frobenius manifold associated with a transcendent holomorphic at x=0.