Necessary conditions for Liouvillian solutions of (third order) linear differential equations (Q1340506)

Kovacic gave an algorithm to decide if a second order homogeneous linear differential equation has Liouvillian solutions. In this paper, the authors derive the necessary conditions for the existence of solutions given by Kovacic, from group theoretic techniques. In an earlier paper the authors had shown that if a third order linear differential equation \(L(y) = 0\) with coefficients in the field of formal Laurent series has a Liouvillian solution then either the differential Galois group is a reducible subgroup of \(\text{SL}(3,\mathbb{C})\), or an imprimitive subgroup of \(\text{SL}(3,\mathbb{C})\), or a finite primitive subgroup of \(\text{SL}(3,\mathbb{C})\). If none of these hold, then \(L(y) = 0\) has no Liouvillian solutions and the differential Galois group is an infinite primitive subgroup of \(\text{SL}(3,\mathbb{C})\). In this paper necessary conditions for the three cases mentioned above are given and in the last section linear differential equations having three singular points are dealt with.