Nonintersecting Brownian motions on the half-line and discrete Gaussian orthogonal polynomials
Karl Liechty
备注:
39 pages, 4 figures; The title has been changed from "The limiting distribution of the maximal height of nonintersecting Brownian excursions and discrete Gaussian orthogonal polynomials." This is a reflection of the fact that the analysis has been adapted to include nonintersecting Brownian motions with either reflecting of absorbing boundaries at zero. To appear in J. Stat. Phys
We study the distribution of the maximal height of the outermost path in the model of $N$ nonintersecting Brownian motions on the half-line as $N\to \infty$, showing that it converges in the proper scaling to the Tracy-Widom distribution for the largest eigenvalue of the Gaussian orthogonal ensemble. This is as expected from the viewpoint that the maximal height of the outermost path converges to the maximum of the $\textrm{Airy}_2$ process minus a parabola. Our proof is based on Riemann-Hilbert analysis of a system of discrete orthogonal polynomials with a Gaussian weight in the double scaling limit as this system approaches saturation. We consequently compute the asymptotics of the free energy and the reproducing kernel of the corresponding discrete orthogonal polynomial ensemble in the critical scaling in which the density of particles approaches saturation. Both of these results can be viewed as dual to the case in which the mean density of eigenvalues in a random matrix model is vanishing at one point.
We study a model of nonintersecting Brownian bridges on an interval with either absorbing or reflecting walls at the boundaries, focusing on the point in space-time at which the particles meet the wall. These processes are determinantal, and in different scaling limits when the particles approach the reflecting (resp. absorbing) walls we obtain hard-edge limiting kernels which are the even (resp. odd) parts of the Pearcey and tacnode kernels. We also show that in the single time case, our hard-edge tacnode kernels are equivalent to the ones studied by Delvaux [16], defined in terms of a $4\tim…
Nonintersecting Brownian bridges on the unit circle form a determinantal stochastic process exhibiting random matrix statistics for large numbers of walkers. We investigate the effect of adding a drift term to walkers on the circle conditioned to start and end at the same position. For each return time $T<π^2$ we show that if the absolute value of the drift is less than a critical value then the expected total winding number is asymptotically zero. In addition, we compute the asymptotic distribution of total winding numbers in the double-scaling regime in which the expected total winding is fi…
Consider non-intersecting Brownian motions on the real line, starting from the origin at t=0, with a number of particles forced to reach p distinct target points at time t=1. This work shows that the transition probability, that is the probability for the particles to pass through windows E_k at times t_k, satisfies, in a new set of variables, a non-linear PDE which can be expressed as a near-Wronskian; that is a determinant of a matrix of size p+1, with each row being a derivative of the previous, except for the last column. It is an interesting open question to understand those equations fro…
We consider an ensemble of $n$ nonintersecting Brownian particles on the unit circle with diffusion parameter $n^{-1/2}$, which are conditioned to begin at the same point and to return to that point after time $T$, but otherwise not to intersect. There is a critical value of $T$ which separates the subcritical case, in which it is vanishingly unlikely that the particles wrap around the circle, and the supercritical case, in which particles may wrap around the circle. In this paper, we show that in the subcritical and critical cases the probability that the total winding number is zero is almos…
We study finite size and temperature XX0 Heisenberg spin chain in weak and strong coupling regimes. By using an elegant connection of the model to integrable combinatorics and probability, we explore and interpret a possible phase structure of the model in asymptotic limit: the limit of large inverse temperature and size. First, partition function and free energy of the model are derived by using techniques and results from random matrix models and nonintersecting Brownian motion. We show that, in the asymptotic limit, partition function of the model, written in terms of matrix integral, is go…
As an image of the many-to-one map of loop-erasing operation $\LE$ of random walks, a self-avoiding walk (SAW) is obtained. The loop-erased random walk (LERW) model is the statistical ensemble of SAWs such that the weight of each SAW $ζ$ is given by the total weight of all random walks $π$ which are inverse images of $ζ$, $\{π: \LE(π)=ζ\}$. We regard the Brownian paths as the continuum limits of random walks and consider the statistical ensemble of loop-erased Brownian paths (LEBPs) as the continuum limits of the LERW model. Following the theory of Fomin on nonintersecting LERWs, we introduce …
The Airy line ensemble is a central object in random matrix theory and last passage percolation defined by a determinantal formula. The goal of this paper is to provide a set of tools which allow for precise probabilistic analysis of the Airy line ensemble. The two main theorems are a representation in terms of independent Brownian bridges connecting a fine grid of points, and a modulus of continuity result for all lines. Along the way, we give tail bounds and moduli of continuity for nonintersecting Brownian ensembles, and a quick proof of tightness for Dyson's Brownian motion converging to t…
We show that the squared maximal height of the top path among $N$ non-intersecting Brownian bridges starting and ending at the origin is distributed as the top eigenvalue of a random matrix drawn from the Laguerre Orthogonal Ensemble. This result can be thought of as a discrete version of K. Johansson's result that the supremum of the Airy$_2$ process minus a parabola has the Tracy-Widom GOE distribution, and as such it provides an explanation for how this distribution arises in models belonging to the KPZ universality class with flat initial data. The result can be recast in terms of the prob…
We consider the diffusion scaling limit of the one-dimensional vicious walker model of Fisher and derive a system of nonintersecting Brownian motions. The spatial distribution of $N$ particles is studied and it is described by use of the probability density function of eigenvalues of $N \times N$ Gaussian random matrices. The particle distribution depends on the ratio of the observation time $t$ and the time interval $T$ in which the nonintersecting condition is imposed. As $t/T$ is going on from 0 to 1, there occurs a transition of distribution, which is identified with the transition observe…
We study nonintersecting Brownian motions with two prescribed starting and ending positions, in the neighborhood of a tacnode in the time-space plane. Several expressions have been obtained in the literature for the critical correlation kernel $K\tac(x,y)$ that describes the microscopic behavior of the Brownian motions near the tacnode. One approach, due to Kuijlaars, Zhang and the author, expresses the kernel (in the single time case) in terms of a $4\times 4$ matrix valued Riemann-Hilbert problem. Another approach, due to Adler, Ferrari, Johansson, van Moerbeke and Vet\H o in a series of pap…
For the Langevin model of the dynamics of a Brownian particle with perturbations orthogonal to its current velocity, in a regime when the particle velocity modulus becomes constant, an equation for the characteristic function $ψ(t,λ)=M\left[\exp (λ,x(t))/V={\rm v}(0)\right]$ of the position $x(t)$ of the Brownian particle. The obtained results confirm the conclusion that the model of the dynamics of a Brownian particle, which constructed on the basis of an unconventional physical interpretation of the Langevin equations, i. e. stochastic equations with orthogonal influences, leads to the inter…
Using path integral techniques, we compute exactly the distribution of the maximal height H_p of p nonintersecting Brownian walkers over a unit time interval in one dimension, both for excursions (p-watermelons with a wall) and bridges (p-watermelons without a wall), for all integer p\ge 1. For large p, we show that < H_p > \sim \sqrt{2p} (excursions) whereas < H_p > \sim \sqrt{p} (bridges). Our exact results prove that previous numerical experiments only measured the pre-asymptotic behaviors and not the correct asymptotic ones. In addition, our method establishes a physical connection between…
We study the large N asymptotics of the Brownian motions on the orthogonal, unitary and symplectic groups, extend the convergence in non-commutative distribution originally obtained by Biane for the unitary Brownian motion to the orthogonal and symplectic cases, and derive explicit estimates for the speed of convergence in non-commutative distribution of arbitrary words in independent Brownian motions. Using these results, we construct and study the large N limit of the Yang-Mills measure on the Euclidean plane with orthogonal, unitary and symplectic structure groups. We prove that each Wilson…
The Riemann-Hilbert problems for multiple orthogonal polynomials of types I and II are used to derive string equations associated to pairs of Lax-Orlov operators. A method for determining the quasiclassical limit of string equations in the phase space of the Whitham hierarchy of dispersionless integrable systems is provided. Applications to the analysis of the large-n limit of multiple orthogonal polynomials and their associated random matrix ensembles and models of non-intersecting Brownian motions are given.
We work out the relation between Chern-Simons, 2d Yang-Mills on the cylinder, and Brownian motion. We show that for the unitary, orthogonal and symplectic groups, various observables in Chern-Simons theory on S^3 and lens spaces are exactly given by counting the number of paths of a Brownian particle wandering in the fundamental Weyl chamber of the corresponding Lie algebra. We construct a fermionic formulation of Chern-Simons on $S^3$ which allows us to identify the Brownian particles as B-model branes moving on a non-commutative two-sphere, and construct 1- and 2-matrix models to compute Bro…
We show that the Riemannian Gaussian distributions on symmetric spaces, introduced in recent years, are of standard random matrix type. We exploit this to compute analytically marginals of the probability density functions. This can be done fully, using Stieltjes-Wigert orthogonal polynomials, for the case of the space of Hermitian matrices, where the distributions have already appeared in the physics literature. For the case when the symmetric space is the space of $m \times m$ symmetric positive definite matrices, we show how to efficiently compute by evaluating Pfaffians at specific values …