We consider the domino tilings of an Aztec diamond with a cut-off corner of macroscopic square shape and given size, and address the bulk properties of tilings as the size is varied. We observe that the free energy exhibits a third-order phase transition when the cut-off square, increasing in size, reaches the arctic ellipse---the phase separation curve of the original (unmodified) Aztec diamond. We obtain this result by studying the thermodynamic limit of certain nonlocal correlation function of the underlying six-vertex model with domain wall boundary conditions, the so-called emptiness formation probability (EFP). We consider EFP in two different representations: as a tau-function for Toda chains and as a random matrix model integral. The latter has a discrete measure and a linear potential with hard walls; the observed phase transition shares properties with both Gross-Witten-Wadia and Douglas-Kazakov phase transitions.
We study the construction of substitution tilings of the plane based on certain simplicial configurations of tangents of the deltoid with evenly distributed orientations. The random tiling ensembles are obtained as a result of tile rearrangements in the substitution rules associated to edge flips.
The diffraction spectrum of the dart-rhombus random tiling of the plane is derived in rigorous terms. Using the theory of dimer models, it is shown that it consists of Bragg peaks and an absolutely continuous diffuse background, but no singular continuous component. The Bragg part is given explicitly.
This paper establishes a universality result for scaling limits of uniformly random lozenge tilings of large domains. We prove that whenever a boundary of the domain has three adjacent straight segments inclined under 120 degrees to each other, the asymptotics of tilings near the middle segment is described by the GUE--corners process of random matrix theory. An important step in our argument is to show that fluctuations of the height function of random tilings on essentially arbitrary simply-connected domains of diameter $N$ have smaller magnitude than $N^{1/2}$.
We investigate certain measures induced by families of non-intersecting paths in domino tilings of the Aztec diamond, rhombus tilings of an abc-hexagon, a dimer model on a cylindrical brick lattice and a growth model. The measures obtained, e.g. the Krawtchouk and Hahn ensembles, have the same structure as the eigenvalue measures in random matrix theory like GUE, which can in fact be obtained from non-intersecting Brownian motions. The derivations of the measures are based on the Karlin-McGregor or Lindström-Gessel-Viennot method. We use the measure to show some asymptotic results for the mode…
We consider random lozenge tilings on the triangular lattice with holes $Q_1,...,Q_n$ in some fixed position. For each unit triangle not in a hole, consider the average orientation of the lozenge covering it. We show that the scaling limit of this discrete field is the electrostatic field obtained when regarding each hole $Q_i$ as an electrical charge of magnitude equal to the difference between the number of unit triangles of the two different orientations inside $Q_i$. This is then restated in terms of random surfaces, yielding the result that the average over surfaces with prescribed height…
We explain the relation between certain random tiling models and interacting particle systems belonging to the anisotropic KPZ (Kardar-Parisi-Zhang) universality class in 2+1-dimensions. The link between these two \emph{a priori} disjoint sets of models is a consequence of the presence of shuffling algorithms that generate random tilings under consideration. To see the precise connection, we represent both a random tiling and the corresponding particle system through a set of non-intersecting lines, whose dynamics is induced by the shuffling algorithm or the particle dynamics. The resulting cl…
The diffraction of stochastic point sets, both Bernoulli and Markov, and of random tilings with crystallographic symmetries is investigated in rigorous terms. In particular, we derive the diffraction spectrum of 1D random tilings, of stochastic product tilings built from cuboids, and of planar random tilings based on solvable dimer models, augmented by a brief outline of the diffraction from the classical 2D Ising lattice gas. We also give a summary of the measure theoretic approach to mathematical diffraction theory which underlies the unique decomposition of the diffraction spectrum into its…
We study large-scale height fluctuations of random stepped surfaces corresponding to uniformly random lozenge tilings of polygons on the triangular lattice. For a class of polygons (which allows arbitrarily large number of sides), we show that these fluctuations are asymptotically governed by a Gaussian free (massless) field. This complements the similar result obtained in Kenyon [Comm. Math. Phys. 281 (2008) 675-709] about tilings of regions without frozen facets of the limit shape. In our asymptotic analysis we use the explicit double contour integral formula for the determinantal correlatio…
We prove that the asymptotic of the bulk local statistics in models of random lozenge tilings is universal in the vicinity of straight boundaries of the tiled domains. The result applies to uniformly random lozenge tilings of large polygonal domains on triangular lattice and to the probability measures describing the decomposition in Gelfand-Tsetlin bases of tensor products of representations of unitary groups. In a weaker form our theorem also applies to random domino tilings.
Consider a Voronoi tiling of the Euclidean space based on a realization of a inhomogeneous Poisson random set. A Voronoi polyomino is a finite and connected union of Voronoi tiles. In this paper we provide tail bounds for the number of boxes that are intersected by a Voronoi polyomino, and vice-versa. These results will be crucial to analyze self-avoiding paths, greedy polyominoes and first-passage percolation models on Voronoi tilings and on the dual graph, named the Delaunay triangulation.
A Gelfand-Tsetlin scheme of depth N is a triangular array with m integers at level m, m=1,...,N, subject to certain interlacing constraints. We study the ensemble of uniformly random Gelfand-Tsetlin schemes with arbitrary fixed N-th row. We obtain an explicit double contour integral expression for the determinantal correlation kernel of this ensemble (and also of its q-deformation). This provides new tools for asymptotic analysis of uniformly random lozenge tilings of polygons on the triangular lattice; or, equivalently, of random stepped surfaces. We work with a class of polygons which allows…
We consider asymtotics of a domino tiling model on a class of domains which we call rectangular Aztec diamonds. We prove the Law of Large Numbers for the corresponding height functions and provide explicit formulas for the limit. For a special class of examples, the explicit parametrization of the frozen boundary is given. It turns out to be an algebraic curve with very special properties. Moreover, we establish the convergence of the fluctuations to the Gaussian Free Field in appropriate coordinates. Our main tool is a recently developed moment method for discrete particle systems.
We give a new proof of the fact that, near a turning point of the frozen boundary, the vertical tiles in a uniformly random lozenge tiling of a large sawtooth domain are distributed like the eigenvalues of a GUE random matrix. Our argument uses none of the standard tools of integrable probability. In their place, it uses a combinatorial interpretation of the Harish-Chandra/Itzykson-Zuber integral as a generating function for desymmetrized Hurwitz numbers.
We study asymptotics of $q$-distributed random lozenge tilings of sawtooth domains (equivalently, of random interlacing integer arrays with fixed top row). Under the distribution we consider each tiling is weighted proportionally to $q^{\mathsf{vol}}$, where $\mathsf{vol}$ is the volume under the corresponding 3D stepped surface. We prove the following Interlacing Central Limit Theorem: as $q\rightarrow1$, the domain gets large, and the fixed top row approximates a given nonrandom profile, the vertical lozenges are distributed as the eigenvalues of a GUE random matrix and of its successive pri…
Standard statistical mechanical or condensed matter arguments tell us that bulk properties of a physical system do not depend too much on boundary conditions. Random tilings of large regions provide counterexamples to such intuition, as illustrated by the famous 'arctic circle theorem' for dimer coverings in two dimensions. In these notes, I discuss such examples in the context of critical phenomena, and their relation to 1+1d quantum particle models. All those turn out to share a common feature: they are inhomogeneous, in the sense that local densities now depend on position in the bulk. I ex…
A combination of direct and inverse Fourier transforms on the unitary group $U(N)$ identifies normalized characters with probability measures on $N$-tuples of integers. We develop the $N\to\infty$ version of this correspondence by matching the asymptotics of partial derivatives at the identity of logarithm of characters with Law of Large Numbers and Central Limit Theorem for global behavior of corresponding random $N$-tuples. As one application we study fluctuations of the height function of random domino and lozenge tilings of a rich class of domains. In this direction we prove the Kenyon-Oko…
We consider triangular holes on the hexagonal lattice and we study their interaction when the rest of the lattice is covered by dimers. More precisely, we analyze the joint correlation of these triangular holes in a ``sea'' of dimers. We determine the asymptotics of the joint correlation (for large separations between the holes) in the case when one of the holes has side 1, all remaining holes have side 2, and the holes are distributed symmetrically with respect to a symmetry axis. Our result has a striking physical interpretation. If we regard the holes as electrical charges, with charge equa…
We use the periodic Schur process, introduced in arXiv:math/0601019v1, to study the random height function of lozenge tilings (equivalently, dimers) on an infinite cylinder distributed under two variants of the $q^{\operatorname{vol}}$ measure. Under the first variant, corresponding to random cylindric partitions, the height function converges to a deterministic limit shape and fluctuations around it are given by the Gaussian free field in the conformal structure predicted by the Kenyon-Okounkov conjecture. Under the second variant, corresponding to an unrestricted dimer model on the cylinder,…
Random tilings are interesting as idealizations of atomistic models of quasicrystals and for their connection to problems in combinatorics and algorithms. Of particular interest is the tiling entropy density, which measures the relation of the number of distinct tilings to the number of constituent tiles. Tilings by squares and 45 degree rhombi receive special attention as presumably the simplest model that has not yet been solved exactly in the thermodynamic limit. However, an exact enumeration formula can be evaluated for tilings in finite regions with fixed boundaries. We implement this alg…
Random tilings of very large domains will typically lead to a solid, a liquid, and a gas phase. In the two-phase case, the solid-liquid boundary (arctic curve) is smooth, possibly with singularities. At the point of tangency of the arctic curve with the domain-boundary, the tiles of a certain shape form for large-size domains a singly interlacing set, fluctuating according to the eigenvalues of the principal minors of a GUE-matrix (Gaussian unitary ensemble). Introducing non-convexities in large domains may lead to the appearance of several interacting liquid regions: they can merely touch, le…
This paper is based on the study of random lozenge tilings of non-convex polygonal regions with interacting non-convexities (cuts) and the corresponding asymptotic kernel as in [3] and [4] (discrete tacnode kernel). Here this kernel is used to find the probability distributions and joint probability distributions for the fluctuation of tiles along lines in between the cuts. These distributions are new.
Our work deals with symmetric rational functions and probabilistic models based on the fully inhomogeneous six vertex (ice type) model satisfying the free fermion condition. Two families of symmetric rational functions $F_λ,G_λ$ are defined as certain partition functions of the six vertex model, with variables corresponding to row rapidities, and the labeling signatures $λ=(λ_1\ge \ldots\ge λ_N)\in \mathbb{Z}^N$ encoding boundary conditions. These symmetric functions generalize Schur symmetric polynomials, as well as some of their variations, such as factorial and supersymmetric Schur polynomi…
Domino tilings of the two-periodic Aztec diamond feature all of the three possible types of phases of random tiling models. These phases are determined by the decay of correlations between dominoes and are generally known as solid, liquid and gas. The liquid-solid boundary is easy to define microscopically and is known in many models to be described by the Airy process in the limit of a large random tiling. The liquid-gas boundary has no obvious microscopic description. Using the height function we define a random measure in the two-periodic Aztec diamond designed to detect the long range corr…
We consider random fields indexed by finite subsets of an amenable discrete group, taking values in the Banach-space of bounded right-continuous functions. The field is assumed to be equivariant, local, coordinate-wise monotone, and almost additive, with finite range dependence. Using the theory of quasi-tilings we prove an uniform ergodic theorem, more precisely, that averages along a Foelner sequence converge uniformly to a limiting function. Moreover we give explicit error estimates for the approximation in the sup norm.
Tiling spaces are constructed using a metric in which two tilings of $\mathbb{R}^n$ are close if and only if, after a small translation, they agree on a large ball around the origin. We construct analogous spaces to study random triangulations of the plane. We construct a continuous space which is a foliated space equipped with a transverse measure, and a discrete space which is a transversal of that space. Measures on these triangulations can be constructed as limits of measures on spheres. We consider von Neumann algebras associated with these spaces. Under certain conditions, we show that t…
