The supercritical regime in the normal matrix model with cubic potential (Q2517230)

The authors consider the normal matrix model with a cubic potential and study its critical behavior in finite time. They analyze the supercritical regime and find that the large-\(n\) behavior is described by the evolution of a spectral curve satisfying the Boutroux condition, which means that all the periods of a certain meromorphic differential are purely imaginary. The Boutroux condition determines a system of contours \(\Sigma_1,\) consisting of the motherbody and whiskers sticking out of the domain. A second critical behavior is found for which the original motherbody shrinks to a point at the origin and only the whiskers remain. In the regime before the second criticality the authors also give strong asymptotics of the orthogonal polynomials by means of a steepest descent analysis of a \(3\times3\) matrix-valued Riemann-Hilbert problem.