On the monodromy of the deformed cubic oscillator

Abstract

We study a second-order linear differential equation known as the deformed cubic oscillator, whose isomonodromic deformations are controlled by the first Painlevé equation. We use the generalised monodromy map for this equation to give solutions to the Riemann-Hilbert problems of (Bridgeland in Invent Math 216(1):69–124, 2019) arising from the Donaldson-Thomas theory of the A_2 quiver. These are the first known solutions to such problems beyond the uncoupled case. The appendix by Davide Masoero contains a WKB analysis of the asymptotics of the monodromy map.