An ergodic study of Painlevé VI (Q2458827)

The main theme of this paper is an ergodic study of the sixth Painlevé equation, that is, a thorough investigation of chaotic behavior of the global dynamics of Painlevé VI. The authors have succeeded in showing that its Poincaré return map is chaotic along almost all loops by using the following three recent advances in the theory of Painlevé equations and complex surface dynamics; (i) the moduli-theoretical formulation of the Painlevé dynamical system established in joint works of one of the authors with Inaba and Saito, (ii) the identification of a Poincaré return map with a birational map on the projective cubic surface via Riemann-Hilbert correspondence (to be more precise, Painlevé flow is conjugated to an isomonodromic flow on a moduli space of monodromy representations via Riemann-Hilbert correspondence and the compactified moduli space of monodromy representations is identified with a projective cubic surface), and (iii) some recent results from birational surface dynamics, especially some deep ergodic studies of birational maps of complex surfaces. Furthermore, counting the number of periodic points of the birational map in question by applying the Lefschetz fixed point formula, the authors also show the exponential growth of the number of periodic solutions along those loops.