The Deift-Zhou steepest descent method to long-time asymptotics for the Sasa-Satsuma equation (Q1784840)

The authors investigate the long-time asymptotics of the Cauchy problem for the Sasa-Satsuma equation $u_t+u_{xxx}+6|u|^2 u_x+3u (|u|^2)_x=0$. The problem is transformed to a $3 \times 3$ matrix Riemann-Hilbert problem with the help of the corresponding Lax pair. Two distinct factorizations of the jump matrix are given. The long-time asymptotics is obtained by using the nonlinear steepest descent method.