We study the partition functions associated with non-intersecting polymers in a random environment. By considering paths in series and in parallel, the partition functions carry natural notions of subadditivity, allowing the effective study of their asymptotics. For a certain choice of random environment, the geometric RSK correspondence provides an explicit representation of the partition functions in terms of a stochastic interface. Formally this leads to a variational description of the macroscopic behaviour of the interface and hence the free energy of the associated non-intersecting polymer model. At zero temperature we relate this variational description to the Marchenko-Pastur distribution, and give a new derivation of the surface tension of the bead model.
We show that the geometric lifting of the RSK correspondence introduced by A.N. Kirillov (2001) is volume preserving with respect to a natural product measure on its domain, and that the integrand in Givental's integral formula for GL(n,R)-Whittaker functions arises naturally in this context. Apart from providing further evidence that Whittaker functions are the natural analogue of Schur polynomials in this setting, our results also provide a new `combinatorial' framework for the study of random polymers. When the input matrix consists of random inverse gamma distributed weights, the probabili…
This thesis deals with some $(1+1)$-dimensional lattice path models from the KPZ universality class: the directed random polymer with inverse-gamma weights (known as log-gamma polymer) and its zero temperature degeneration, i.e. the last passage percolation model, with geometric or exponential waiting times. We consider three path geometries: point-to-line, point-to-half-line, and point-to-line with paths restricted to stay in a half-plane. Through exact formulas, we establish new connections between integrable probabilistic models and the ubiquitous Whittaker and Schur functions. More in deta…
The Robinson-Schensted (RS) correspondence and its variants naturally give rise to integrable dynamics of non-intersecting particle systems. In previous work, the author exhibited a RS correspondence for geometric crystals by constructing a Littelmann path model, in general Lie type. Since this representation-theoretic map takes as input a continuous path on a Euclidian space, the natural starting measure is the Wiener measure. In this paper, we characterize the measures induced by Brownian motion through the RS map. On the one hand, the highest weight in the output is a remarkable Markov proc…
We consider the partition function $Z_{\ell}(\vec x,0\vert \vec y,t)$ of $\ell$ non-intersecting continuous directed polymers of length $t$ in dimension $1+1$, in a white noise environment, starting from positions $\vec x$ and terminating at positions $\vec y$. When $\ell=1$, it is well known that for fixed $x$, the field $\log Z_1(x,0\vert y,t)$ solves the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation and admits the Brownian motion as a stationary measure. In particular, as $t$ goes to infinity, $Z_1(x,0\vert y,t)/Z_1(x,0\vert 0,t) $ converges to the exponential of a Brownian motion $B(y)$. In this article, w…
We consider directed polymer models involving multiple non-intersecting random walks moving through a space-time disordered environment in one spatial dimension. For a single random walk, Alberts, Khanin and Quastel proved that under intermediate disorder scaling (in which time and space are scaled diffusively, and the strength of the environment is scaled to zero in a critical manner) the polymer partition function converges to the solution to the stochastic heat equation with multiplicative white noise. In this paper we prove the analogous result for multiple non-intersecting random walks st…
We establish a fundamental connection between the geometric RSK correspondence and GL(N,R)-Whittaker functions, analogous to the well known relationship between the RSK correspondence and Schur functions. This gives rise to a natural family of measures associated with GL(N,R)-Whittaker functions which are the analogues in this setting of the Schur measures on integer partitions. The corresponding analogue of the Cauchy-Littlewood identity can be seen as a generalisation of an integral identity for GL(N,R)-Whittaker functions due to Bump and Stade. As an application, we obtain an explicit integ…
We study the semi-discrete directed polymer model introduced by O'Connell-Yor in its stationary regime, based on our previous work on the stationary $q$-totally asymmetric simple exclusion process ($q$-TASEP) using a two-sided $q$-Whittaker process. We give a formula for the free energy distribution of the polymer model in terms of Fredholm determinant and show that the universal KPZ stationary distribution appears in the long time limit. We also consider the limit to the stationary KPZ equation and discuss the connections with previously found formulas.
Spin $q$-Whittaker symmetric polynomials labeled by partitions $λ$ were recently introduced by Borodin and Wheeler (arXiv:1701.06292) in the context of integrable $\mathfrak{sl}_2$ vertex models. They are a one-parameter deformation of the $t=0$ Macdonald polynomials. We present a new, more convenient modification of spin $q$-Whittaker polynomials and find two Macdonald type $q$-difference operators acting diagonally in these polynomials with eigenvalues, respectively, $q^{-λ_1}$ and $q^{λ_N}$ (where $λ$ is the polynomial's label). We study probability measures on interlacing arrays based on s…
We prove that the values of discrete directed polymer partition functions involving multiple non-intersecting paths remain invariant under replacing the background weights by their images under the geometric RSK correspondence. This result is inspired by a recent and remarkable identity proved by Dauvergne, Orthmann and Virág which is recovered as the zero-temperature, semi-discrete limit of our main result.
We introduce and study q-randomized Robinson-Schensted-Knuth (RSK) correspondences which interpolate between the classical (q=0) and geometric (q->1) RSK correspondences (the latter ones are sometimes also called tropical). For 0<q<1 our correspondences are randomized, i.e., the result of an insertion is a certain probability distribution on semistandard Young tableaux. Because of this randomness, we use the language of discrete time Markov dynamics on two-dimensional interlacing particle arrays (these arrays are in a natural bijection with semistandard tableaux). Our dynamics act nicely on a …
Macdonald processes are probability measures on sequences of partitions defined in terms of nonnegative specializations of the Macdonald symmetric functions and two Macdonald parameters q,t in [0,1). We prove several results about these processes, which include the following. (1) We explicitly evaluate expectations of a rich family of observables for these processes. (2) In the case t=0, we find a Fredholm determinant formula for a q-Laplace transform of the distribution of the last part of the Macdonald-random partition. (3) We introduce Markov dynamics that preserve the class of Macdonald pr…
We compute the joint probability density function (jpdf) P_N(M, τ_M) of the maximum M and its position τ_M for N non-intersecting Brownian excursions, on the unit time interval, in the large N limit. For N \to \infty, this jpdf is peaked around M = \sqrt{2N} and τ_M = 1/2, while the typical fluctuations behave for large N like M - \sqrt{2N} \propto s N^{-1/6} and τ_M - 1/2 \propto w N^{-1/3} where s and w are correlated random variables. One obtains an explicit expression of the limiting jpdf P(s,w) in terms of the Tracy-Widom distribution for the Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble (GOE) of Random M…
We revisit the problem of an elastic line (e.g. a vortex line in a superconductor) subject to both columnar disorder and point disorder in dimension $d=1+1$. Upon applying a transverse field, a delocalization transition is expected, beyond which the line is tilted macroscopically. We investigate this transition in the fixed tilt angle ensemble and within a one-way model where backward jumps are neglected. From recent results about directed polymers and their connections to random matrix theory, we find that for a single line and a single strong defect this transition in presence of point disor…
