Spaces of initial conditions for quartic Hamiltonian systems of Painlevé and quasi-Painlevé type

Abstract The geometric approach for Painlevé and quasi-Painlevé differential equations in the complex plane is applied to non-autonomous Hamiltonian systems, quartic in the dependent variables. By computing their defining manifolds (analogue of the Okamoto’s space of initial conditions in the quasi-Painlevé case), we provide a classification of such systems. We distinguish the various cases by the local behaviour at the movable singularities of the solutions, which are algebraic poles or ordinary poles. The principal cases are categorised by the initial base points of the system in the extended phase space C P 2 and their multiplicities, arising from the coalescence of 4 simple base points in the generic case. Through the mechanisms of coalescence of base points and degeneration (by setting certain coefficient functions in the Hamiltonian to 0), all possible sub-cases of quartic Hamiltonian systems with the quasi-Painlevé property are obtained, and are characterised by their corresponding Newton polygons. As particular sub-cases we recover certain systems equivalent to known Painlevé equations, or variants thereof. The resulting picture is a multi-faceted description of each case: the local behaviour around singularities, the surface type, and the Newton polygon.