Classification of Real Solutions of the Fourth Painleve Equation

Abstract

Painleve transcendents are usually considered as complex functions of a complex variable, but in applications it is often the real cases that are of interest. Under a reasonable assumption (concerning the behavior of a dynamical system associated with Painleve IV, as discussed in a recent paper), we give a number of results towards a classification of the real solutions of Painleve IV (or, more precisely, symmetric Painleve IV), according to their asymptotic behavior and singularities. We show the existence of globally nonsingular real solutions of symmetric Painleve IV for arbitrary nonzero values of the parameters, with the dimension of the space of such solutions and their asymptotics depending on the signs of the parameters. We show that for a generic choice of the parameters, there exists a unique finite sequence of singularities for which symmetric Painleve IV has a two-parameter family of solutions with this singularity sequence. There also exist solutions with singly infinite and doubly infinite sequences of singularities, and we identify which such sequences are possible (assuming generic asymptotics in the case of a singly infinite sequence). Most (but not all) of the special solutions of Painleve IV correspond to nongeneric values of the parameters, but we mention some results for these solutions as well.