ABSTRACT. Peakons are special weak solutions of a class of nonlinear partial differential equations modelling non-linear phenomena such as the breakdown of regularity and the onset of shocks. We show that the natural concept of weak solutions in the case of the modified Camassa-Holm equation studied in this paper is dictated by the distributional compatibility of its Lax pair and, as a result, it differs from the one proposed and used in the literature based on the concept of weak solutions used for equations of the Burgers type. Subsequently, we give a complete construction of peakon solutions satisfying the modified Camassa-Holm equation in the sense of distributions; our approach is based on solving certain inverse boundary value problem the solution of which hinges on a combination of classical techniques of analysis involving Stieltjes' continued fractions and multi-point Padé approximations. We propose sufficient conditions needed to ensure the global existence of peakon solutions and analyze the large time asymptotic behaviour whose special features include a formation of pairs of peakons which share asymptotic speeds, as well as Toda-like sorting property.

Skew-orthogonal polynomials (SOPs) arise in the study of the n-point distribution function for orthogonal and symplectic random matrix ensembles. Motivated by the average of characteristic polynomials of the Bures random matrix ensemble studied in [22], we propose the concept of partial-skew-orthogonal polynomials (PSOPs) as a modification of the SOPs, and then the PSOPs with a variety of special skew-symmetric kernels and weight functions are addressed. By considering appropriate deformations of the weight functions, we derive nine integrable lattices in different dimensions. As a consequence, the tau-functions for these systems are shown to be expressed in terms of Pfaffians and the wave vectors PSOPs. In fact, the taufunctions also admit the representations of multiple integrals. Among these integrable lattices, some of them are known, while the others are novel to the best of our knowledge. In particular, one integrable lattice is related to the partition function of the Bures random matrix ensemble.Besides, we derive a discrete integrable lattice, which can be used to compute certain vector Padé approximants. This yields the first example regarding the connection between integrable lattices and vector Padé approximants, for which Hietarinta, Joshi and Nijhoff pointed out that " This field remains largely to be explored. " in the recent monograph [27, Section 4.4] .