Higher genera Catalan numbers and Hirota equations for extended nonlinear Schrödinger hierarchy

We consider the Dubrovin--Frobenius manifold of rank $2$ whose genus expansion at a special point controls the enumeration of a higher genera generalization of the Catalan numbers, or, equivalently, the enumeration of maps on surfaces, ribbon graphs, Grothendieck's dessins d'enfants, strictly monotone Hurwitz numbers, or lattice points in the moduli spaces of curves. Liu, Zhang, and Zhou conjectured that the full partition function of this Dubrovin--Frobenius manifold is a tau-function of the extended nonlinear Schr\"odinger hierarchy, an extension of a particular rational reduction of the Kadomtsev--Petviashvili hierarchy. We prove a version of their conjecture specializing the Givental--M…