Liouville and Painlevé equations and Yang–Mills strings

Abstract

Stringlike solutions of the self-dual Yang–Mills equations (dimensionally reduced to R2) are sought. A multistring Ansatz results in the sinh–Gordon and Liouville equations. According to a general theorem, the solutions must be either real and singular and have infinite action, or complex and nonsingular, with zero action. In the Liouville case, explicit arbitrarily separated n-string solutions of both classes are given. The magnetic flux for these solutions is found to be the Chern class of a Kaehler manifold, and it consequently assumes quantized values 4πn/e. The axisymmetric version of the sinh–Gordon is solved by the third Painlevé transcendent P3, using the results on P3 by Wu et al. [Phys. Rev. B 13, 316 (1976)] and McCoy et al. [J. Math. Phys. 18, 10 (1977)]. The axisymmetric case can be cast into the Ernst equation framework for the generation of further solutions. In the Appendix, the Euclideanized Ernst equation is shown to give self-dual Gibbons–Hawking gravitational instantons.