A nonlinear stationary phase method for oscillatory Riemann-Hilbert problems

We study the asymptotic behavior of oscillatory Riemann-Hilbert problems arising in the AKNS hierarchy of integrable nonlinear PDE's. Our method is based on the Deift-Zhou nonlinear steepest descent method in which the given Riemann-Hilbert problem localizes to small neighborhoods of stationary phase points. In their original work, Deift and Zhou only considered analytic phase functions. Subsequently Varzugin extended the Deift-Zhou method to a certain restricted class of non-analytic phase functions. In this paper, we extend Varzugin's method to a substantially more general class of non-analytic phase functions. In our work real variable methods play a key role.