On the solutions of the dKP equation: the nonlinear Riemann Hilbert problem, longtime behaviour, implicit solutions and wave breaking

We have recently solved the inverse scattering problem for one-parameter families of vector fields, and used this result to construct the formal solution of the Cauchy problem for a class of integrable nonlinear partial differential equations in multidimensions, including the second heavenly equation of Plebanski and the dispersionless Kadomtsev-Petviashvili (dKP) equation. We showed, in particular, that the associated inverse problems can be expressed in terms of nonlinear Riemann-Hilbert problems on the real axis. In this paper, we make use of the nonlinear Riemann-Hilbert problem of dKP (i) to construct the longtime behaviour of the solutions of its Cauchy problem; (ii) to characterize a class of implicit solutions; (iii) to elucidate the spectral mechanism causing the gradient catastrophe of localized solutions of dKP, at finite time as well as in the longtime regime, and the corresponding universal behaviours near breaking.