Painlevé transcendents and the Hankel determinants generated by a discontinuous Gaussian weight

This paper studies the Hankel determinants generated by a discontinuous Gaussian weight with one and two jumps. It is an extension of Chen and Pruessner \cite{Chen2005}, in which they studied the discontinuous Gaussian weight with a single jump. By using the ladder operator approach, we obtain a series of difference and differential equations to describe the Hankel determinant for the single jump case. These equations include the Chazy II equation, continuous and discrete Painlevé IV. In addition, we consider the large $n$ behavior of the corresponding orthogonal polynomials and prove that they satisfy the biconfluent Heun equation. We also consider the jump at the edge under a double scaling, from which a Painlevé XXXIV appeared. Furthermore, we study the Gaussian weight with two jumps, and show that a quantity related to the Hankel determinant satisfies a two variables' generalization of the Jimbo-Miwa-Okamoto $\sigma$ form of the Painlevé IV.