We study a reversible continuous-time Markov dynamics on lozenge tilings of the plane, introduced by Luby et al. Single updates consist in concatenations of $n$ elementary lozenge rotations at adjacent vertices. The dynamics can also be seen as a reversible stochastic interface evolution. When the update rate is chosen proportional to $1/n$, the dynamics is known to enjoy especially nice features: a certain Hamming distance between configurations contracts with time on average and the relaxation time of the Markov chain is diffusive, growing like the square of the diameter of the system. Here, we present another remarkable feature of this dynamics, namely we derive, in the diffusive time scale, a fully explicit hydrodynamic limit equation for the height function (in the form of a non-linear parabolic PDE). While this equation cannot be written as a gradient flow w.r.t. a surface energy functional, it has nice analytic properties, for instance it contracts the $\mathbb L^2$ distance between solutions. The mobility coefficient $μ$ in the equation has non-trivial but explicit dependence on the interface slope and, interestingly, is directly related to the system's surface free energy. The derivation of the hydrodynamic limit is not fully rigorous, in that it relies on an unproven assumption of local equilibrium.
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.
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 $N^{1/2}$.
It has been well known for a long time that the height function of random lozenge tilings of large domains follow a law of large number and possible limits called dimer limit shapes are well understood. For the next order, it is expected that fluctuations behave like version of a Gaussian Free field, at least away from some special "frozen" regions. However despite being one of the main questions in the domain for 20 years, only special cases have been obtained. In this paper we show that for any specified limit shape with no frozen region, one can construct a sequence of domains whose height …
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 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 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…
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,…
We show that bounded changes to the boundary of a lozenge tilings do not affect the local behaviour inside the domain. As a consequence we prove the existence of a local limit in all domains with planar boundary. The proof does not rely on any exact solvability of the model beyond its links with uniform spanning trees.
Consider the probability that an arbitrary chosen lozenge tiling of the hexagon with side lengths a, b, c, a, b, c contains the horizontal lozenge with lowest vertex (x,y) as if it described the distribution of mass in the plane. We compute the horizontal and the vertical moments of inertia with respect to this distribution. This solves a problem by Propp [1, Problem 7].
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 present a detailed study of a four parameter family of elliptic weights on tilings of a hexagon introduced by Borodin, Gorin and Rains, generalizing some of their results. In the process, we connect the combinatorics of the model with the theory of elliptic special functions. Using canonical coordinates for the hexagon we show how the $n$-point distribution function and transitional probabilities connect to the theory of $BC_n$-symmetric multivariate elliptic special functions and of elliptic difference operators introduced by Rains. In particular, the difference operators intrinsically cap…
We study the Glauber dynamics on the set of tilings of a finite domain of the plane with lozenges of side 1/L. Under the invariant measure of the process (the uniform measure over all tilings), it is well known that the random height function associated to the tiling converges in probability, in the scaling limit $L\to\infty$, to a non-trivial macroscopic shape minimizing a certain surface tension functional. According to the boundary conditions the macroscopic shape can be either analytic or contain "frozen regions" (Arctic Circle phenomenon). It is widely conjectured, on the basis of theoret…
We analyze a random lozenge tiling model of a large regular hexagon, whose underlying weight structure is periodic of period $2$ in both the horizontal and vertical directions. This is a determinantal point process whose correlation kernel is expressed in terms of non-Hermitian matrix valued orthogonal polynomials. This model belongs to a class of models for which the existing techniques for studying asymptotics cannot be applied. The novel part of our method consists of establishing a connection between matrix valued and scalar valued orthogonal polynomials. This allows to simplify the double…
In this paper we study height fluctuations of random lozenge tilings of polygonal domains on the triangular lattice through nonintersecting Bernoulli random walks. For a large class of polygons which have exactly one horizontal upper boundary edge, we show that these random height functions converge to a Gaussian Free Field as predicted by Kenyon and Okounkov [28]. A key ingredient of our proof is a dynamical version of the discrete loop equations as introduced by Borodin, Guionnet and Gorin [5], which might be of independent interest.
We study lozenge tilings of a domain with partially free boundary. In particular, we consider a trapezoidal domain (half hexagon), s.t. the horizontal lozenges on the long side can intersect it anywhere to protrude halfway across. We show that the positions of the horizontal lozenges near the opposite flat vertical boundary have the same joint distribution as the eigenvalues from a Gaussian Unitary Ensemble (the GUE-corners/minors process). We also prove the existence of a limit shape of the height function, which is also a vertically symmetric plane partition. Both behaviors are shown to coin…
We show how to combine Fourier analysis with coupling arguments to bound the mixing times of a variety of Markov chains. The mixing time is the number of steps a Markov chain takes to approach its equilibrium distribution. One application is to a class of Markov chains introduced by Luby, Randall, and Sinclair to generate random tilings of regions by lozenges. For an L X L region we bound the mixing time by O(L^4 log L), which improves on the previous bound of O(L^7), and we show the new bound to be essentially tight. In another application we resolve a few questions raised by Diaconis and Sal…
We study a reversible continuous-time Markov dynamics of a discrete $(2+1)$-dimensional interface. This can be alternatively viewed as a dynamics of lozenge tilings of the $L\times L$ torus, or as a conservative dynamics for a two-dimensional system of interlaced particles. The particle interlacement constraints imply that the equilibrium measures are far from being product Bernoulli: particle correlations decay like the inverse distance squared and interface height fluctuations behave on large scales like a massless Gaussian field. We consider a particular choice of the transition rates, orig…
This paper studies random lozenge tilings of general non-convex polygonal regions. We show that the pairwise interaction of the non-convexities leads asymptotically to new kernels and thus to new statistics for the tiling fluctuations. The precise geometrical figure here consists of a hexagon with cuts along opposite edges. For this model we take limits when the size of the hexagon and the cuts tend to infinity, while keeping certain geometric data fixed in order to guarantee interaction beyond the limit. We show in this paper that the kernel for the finite tiling model can be expressed as a m…
TThe prototypical problem we study here is the following. Given a $2L\times 2L$ square, there are approximately $\exp(4KL^2/π)$ ways to tile it with dominos, i.e. with horizontal or vertical $2\times 1$ rectangles, where $K\approx 0.916$ is Catalan's constant [Kasteleyn '61, Temperley-Fisher '61]. A conceptually simple (even if computationally not the most efficient) way of sampling uniformly one among so many tilings is to introduce a Markov Chain algorithm (Glauber dynamics) where, with rate $1$, two adjacent horizontal dominos are flipped to vertical dominos, or vice-versa. The unique invar…
In this paper, we establish a quenched invariance principle for the random walk on a certain class of infinite, aperiodic, oriented random planar graphs called "T-graphs" [Kenyon-Sheffield04]. These graphs appear, together with the corresponding random walk, in a work [Kenyon07] about the lozenge tiling model, where they are used to compute correlations between lozenges inside large finite domains. The random walk in question is balanced, i.e. it is automatically a martingale. Our main ideas are inspired by the proof of a quenched central limit theorem in stationary ergodic environment on $\ma…
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…
Consider an infinite random matrix $H=(h_{ij})_{0<i,j}$ picked from the Gaussian Unitary Ensemble (GUE). Denote its main minors by $H_i=(h_{rs})_{1\leq r,s\leq i}$ and let the $j$:th largest eigenvalue of $H_i$ be $μ^i_j$. We show that the configuration of all these eigenvalues $(i,μ_j^i)$ form a determinantal point process on $\mathbb{N}\times\mathbb{R}$. Furthermore we show that this process can be obtained as the scaling limit in random tilings of the Aztec diamond close to the boundary. We also discuss the corresponding limit for random lozenge tilings of a hexagon.
We consider stochastic spin-flip dynamics for: (i) monotone discrete surfaces in Z^3 with planar boundary height and (ii) the one-dimensional discrete Solid-on-Solid (SOS) model confined to a box. In both cases we show almost optimal bounds O(L^2polylog(L)) for the mixing time of the chain, where L is the natural size of the system. The dynamics at a macroscopic scale should be described by a deterministic mean curvature motion such that each point of the surface feels a drift which tends to minimize the local surface tension. Inspired by this heuristics, our approach consists in bounding the …
We study a $(2+1)$-dimensional stochastic interface growth model, that is believed to belong to the so-called Anisotropic KPZ (AKPZ) universality class [Borodin and Ferrari, 2014]. It can be seen either as a two-dimensional interacting particle process with drift, that generalizes the one-dimensional Hammersley process [Aldous and Diaconis 1995, Seppalainen 1996], or as an irreversible dynamics of lozenge tilings of the plane [Borodin and Ferrari 2014, Toninelli 2015]. Our main result is a hydrodynamic limit: the interface height profile converges, after a hyperbolic scaling of space and time,…
