The symplectic and twistor geometry of the general isomonodromic deformation problem

Hitchin’s twistor treatment of Schlesinger’s equations is extended to the general isomonodromic deformation problem. It is shown that a generic linear system of ordinary differential equations with gauge group SL(n,C) on a Riemann surface X can be obtained by embedding X in a twistor space Z on which sl(n,C) acts. When a certain obstruction vanishes, the isomonodromic deformations are given by deforming X in Z. This is related to a description of the deformations in terms of Hamiltonian flows on a symplectic manifold constructed from affine orbits in the dual Lie algebra of a loop group.