Fredholm Pfaffian $$\tau $$-Functions for Orthogonal Isospectral and Isomonodromic Systems

Abstract

We extend the approach to \(\tau \)-functions as Widom constants developed by Cafasso, Gavrylenko and Lisovyy to orthogonal loop group Drinfeld–Sokolov reductions and isomonodromic deformations systems. The combinatorial expansion of the \(\tau \)-function as a sum of correlators, each expressed as products of finite determinants, follows from using multicomponent fermionic vacuum expectation values of certain dressing operators encoding the initial conditions and dependence on the time parameters. When reduced to the orthogonal case, these correlators become finite Pfaffians and the determinantal \(\tau \)-functions, both in the Drinfeld–Sokolov and isomonodromic case, become squares of \(\tau \)-functions of Pfaffian type. The results are illustrated by several examples, consisting of polynomial \(\tau \)-functions of orthogonal Drinfeld–Sokolov type and isomonodromic ones with four regular singular points.