Grothendieck’s dessins d’enfants in a web of dualities. III

Abstract

We give a new proof of the equivalence between the dessin partition function and the partition function of the Laguerre unitary ensemble (LUE), originally found by Ambjørn and Chekhov. We also introduce a correction factor for the dessin/LUE partition function, and show that the corrected dessin/LUE partition function is a Dubrovin–Zhang type tau-function of the Toda lattice hierarchy. As an application, we use the approach of Dubrovin and Zhang for the computation of the dessin correlators. In physicists’ terminology, we establish dualities among dessin counting, generalized Penner model, and -topological sigma model.