English

Monodromy of a generalized Lame equation of third order

Classical Analysis and ODEs 2023-07-11 v2

Abstract

We study the monodromy of the following third order linear differential equation y(z)(α(z;τ)+B)y(z)+β(z;τ)y(z)=0,y'''(z)-(\alpha\wp(z;\tau)+B)y'(z)+\beta\wp'(z;\tau)y(z)=0, where BCB\in\mathbb{C} is a parameter, (z;τ)\wp(z;\tau) is the Weierstrass \wp-function with periods 11 and τ\tau, and α,β\alpha,\beta are constants such that the local exponents at the singularity 00 are three distinct integers, which can always be written as nl,1l,n+2l+2-n-l, 1-l, n+2l+2 after a dual transformation, where n,lNn,l\in\mathbb{N}. This ODE can be seen as the third order version of the well-known Lam\'{e} equation y(z)(m(m+1)(z;τ)+B)y(z)=0y''(z)-(m(m+1)\wp(z;\tau)+B)y(z)=0. We say that the monodromy is unitary if the monodromy group is conjugate to a subgroup of the unitary group. We show that \begin{itemize} \item[(i)] if n,ln, l are both odd, then the monodromy can not be unitary; \item[(ii)] if nn is odd and ll is even, then there exist finite values of BB such that the monodromy is the Klein four-group and hence unitary; \item[(iii)] if nn is even, then whether there exists BB such that the monodromy is unitary depends on the choice of the period τ\tau. \end{itemize} The methods of studying the second order Lam\'{e} equation can not work here, and we need to develop different approaches to treat these different cases separately. These results have interesting applications to the integrable SU(3)SU(3) Toda system in another work (Chen-Lin, J. Differ. Geom. to appear).

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.11292,
  title  = {Monodromy of a generalized Lame equation of third order},
  author = {Zhijie Chen and Chang-Shou Lin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.11292},
  year   = {2023}
}