On tau-functions for the KdV hierarchy (Q2658743)

For an arbitrary solution to the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) hierarchy, the generating series of logarithmic derivatives of the tau-function of the solution can be expressed by the basic matrix resolvent via algebraic manipulations. Based on this the authors develop in this paper two new formulae for the generating series by introducing a pair of wave functions of the solution. Applications to the Witten-Kontsevich tau-function, to the generalized Brézin-Gross-Witten (BGW) tau-function, as well as to a modular deformation of the generalized BGW tau-function which they call the Lamé tau-function are also given. The paper is organized as follows. Section 1, is an introduction to the subject. Here, the authors recall the definitions of all of the main objects studied (KdV hierarchy, tau-function, matrix resolvents, wave functions,...), in some cases with definitions slightly different from the most standard ones. In Section 2, the authors review the MR approach. In Sections 3 and 4, they prove the main results and compute explicitly some generalized BGW correlators. In Section 5, they compute Lamé correlators and further remarks are given in Section 6.