Symmetric contours and convergent interpolation

The essence of Stahl-Gonchar-Rakhmanov theory of symmetric contours as applied to the multipoint Padé approximants is the fact that given a germ of an algebraic function and a sequence of rational interpolants with free poles of the germ, if there exists a contour that is “symmetric” with respect to the interpolation scheme, does not separate the plane, and in the complement of which the germ has a single-valued continuation with non-identically zero jump across the contour, then the interpolants converge to that continuation in logarithmic capacity in the complement of the contour. The existence of such a contour is not guaranteed. In this work we do construct a class of pairs interpolation scheme/symmetric contour with the help of hyperelliptic Riemann surfaces (following the ideas of Nuttall & Singh [28] and Baratchart & the author [9]). We consider rational interpolants with free poles of Cauchy transforms of non-vanishing complex densities on such contours under mild smoothness assumptions on the density. We utilize ∂̄-extension of the Riemann-Hilbert technique to obtain formulae of strong asymptotics for the error of interpolation.