Fredholm determinants associated to deformations of the Airy kernel are closely connected to the solution to the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation with narrow wedge initial data, and they also appear as largest particle distribution in models of positive-temperature free fermions. I will explain how logarithmic derivatives of the Fredholm determinants can be expressed in terms of a $2\times 2$ Riemann-Hilbert problem.

This Riemann-Hilbert representation can be used to derive precise lower tail asymptotics for the solution of the KPZ equation with narrow wedge initial data, refining recent results by Corwin and Ghosal, and it reveals a remarkable connection with a family of unbounded solutions to the Korteweg-de Vries (KdV) equation and with an integro-differential version of the Painlevé II equation.