Higher Order Airy and Painlevé Asymptotics for the mKdV Hierarchy

Abstract

In this paper, we consider Cauchy problem for the modified Korteweg-de Vries hierarchy on the real line with decaying initial data. Using the Riemann--Hilbert formulation and nonlinear steepest descent method, we derive a uniform asymptotic expansion to all orders in powers of $t^{-1/(2n+1)}$ with smooth coefficients of the variable $(-1)^{n+1}x((2n+1) t)^{-1/(2n+1)}$ in the self-similarity region for the solution of $n$-th member of the hierarchy. It turns out that the leading asymptotics is described by a family of special solutions of the Painlev\'e II hierarchy, which generalize the classical Ablowitz-Segur solution for the Painelv\'{e} II equation and appear in a variety of random matrix and statistical physics models. We establish the connection formulas for this family of solutions. In the special case that the reflection coefficient vanishes at the origin, the solutions of Painlev\'e II hierarchy in the leading coefficient vanishes as well, the leading and subleading terms in the asymptotic expansion are instead given explicitly in terms of derivatives of the generalized Airy function.