The purpose of this paper is to investigate the limiting distribution functions for a polynuclear growth model with two external sources, which was considered by Prähofer and Spohn. Depending on the strength of the sources, the limiting distribution functions are either the Tracy-Widom functions of random matrix theory, or a new explicit function which has the special property that its mean is zero. Moreover, we obtain transition functions between pairs of the above distribution functions in suitably scaled limits. There are also similar results for a discrete totally asymmetric exclusion process.
We consider a discrete polynuclear growth (PNG) process and prove a functioal limit theorem for its convergrence to the Airy process. This generalizes previous results by Pr"ahofer and Spohn. The result enables us to express the GOE largest eigenvalue (Tracy-Widom) distribution in terms of the Airy process. We also show some results and give a conjecture about the transversal fluctuations in a point to line last passage percolation problem.
This article studies the inhomogeneous geometric polynuclear growth model, the distribution of which is related to Schur functions. We explain a method to derive its distribution functions in both space-like and time-like directions, focusing on the two-time distribution. Asymptotics of the two-time distribution in the KPZ-scaling limit is then considered, extending to two times several single-time distributions in the KPZ universality class.
We study the multi-time distribution in a discrete polynuclear growth model or, equivalently, in directed last-passage percolation with geometric weights. A formula for the joint multi-time distribution function is derived in the discrete setting. It takes the form of a multiple contour integral of a block Fredholm determinant. The asymptotic multi-time distribution is then computed by taking the appropriate KPZ-scaling limit of this formula. This distribution is expected to be universal for models in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class.
We consider the multi-point equal time height fluctuations of a one-dimensional polynuclear growth model in a half space. For special values of the nucleation rate at the origin, the multi-layer version of the model is reduced to a determinantal process, for which the asymptotics can be analyzed. In the scaling limit, the fluctuations near the origin are shown to be equivalent to those of the largest eigenvalue of the orthogonal/symplectic to unitary transition ensemble at soft edge in random matrix theory.
We introduce and study a one parameter deformation of the polynuclear growth (PNG) in $(1+1)$-dimensions, which we call the $t$-PNG model. It is defined by requiring that, when two expanding islands merge, with probability $t$ they sprout another island on top of the merging location. At $t=0$, this becomes the standard (non-deformed) PNG model that, in the droplet geometry, can be reformulated through longest increasing subsequences of uniformly random permutations or through an algorithm known as patience sorting. In terms of the latter, the $t$-PNG model allows errors to occur in the sortin…
We consider the polynuclear growth (PNG) model in 1+1 dimension with flat initial condition and no extra constraints. Through the Robinson-Schensted-Knuth (RSK) construction, one obtains the multilayer PNG model, which consists of a stack of non-intersecting lines, the top one being the PNG height. The statistics of the lines is translation invariant and at a fixed position the lines define a point process. We prove that for large times the edge of this point process, suitably scaled, has a limit. This limit is a Pfaffian point process and identical to the one obtained from the edge scaling of…
The one-dimensional polynuclear growth model with external sources at edges is studied. The height fluctuation at the origin is known to be given by either the Gaussian, the GUE Tracy-Widom distribution, or certain distributions called GOE$^2$ and $F_0$, depending on the strength of the sources. We generalize these results and show that the scaling limit of the multi-point equal time height fluctuations of the model are described by the Fredholm determinant, of which the limiting kernel is explicitly obtained. In particular we obtain two new kernels, describing transitions between the above on…
We present a random matrix interpretation of the distribution functions which have appeared in the study of the one-dimensional polynuclear growth (PNG) model with external sources. It is shown that the distribution, GOE$^2$, which is defined as the square of the GOE Tracy-Widom distribution, can be obtained as the scaled largest eigenvalue distribution of a special case of a random matrix model with a deterministic source, which have been studied in a different context previously. Compared to the original interpretation of the GOE$^2$ as ``the square of GOE'', ours has an advantage that it ca…
Recently Johansson and Rahman obtained the limiting multi-time distribution for the discrete polynuclear growth model, which is equivalent to a discrete TASEP model with step initial condition. In this paper, we obtain a finite time multi-point distribution formula of continuous TASEP with general initial conditions in the space-time plane. We evaluate the limit of this distribution function when the times go to infinity at the same speed for both step and flat initial conditions. These limiting distributions are expected to be universal for all the models in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universali…
We consider the polynuclear growth (PNG) model in 1+1 dimension with flat initial condition and no extra constraints. The joint distributions of surface height at finitely many points at a fixed time moment are given as marginals of a signed determinantal point process. The long time scaling limit of the surface height is shown to coincide with the Airy_1 process. This result holds more generally for the observation points located along any space-like path in the space-time plane. We also obtain the corresponding results for the discrete time TASEP (totally asymmetric simple exclusion process)…
There has been much success in describing the limiting spatial fluctuations of growth models in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality class. A proper rescaling of time should introduce a non-trivial temporal dimension to these limiting fluctuations. In one-dimension, the KPZ class has the dynamical scaling exponent $z=3/2$, that means one should find a universal space-time limiting process under the scaling of time as $t\,T$, space like $t^{2/3} X$ and fluctuations like $t^{1/3}$ as $t\to\infty$. In this paper we provide evidence for this belief. We prove that under certain hypotheses, gr…
We study height fluctuations of interfaces in the $(1+1)$-dimensional Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) class, growing at different speeds in the left half and the right half of space. Carrying out simulations of the discrete polynuclear growth model with two different growth rates, combined with the standard setting for the droplet, flat, and stationary geometries, we find that the fluctuation properties at and near the boundary are described by the KPZ half-space problem developed in the theoretical literature. In particular, in the droplet case, the distribution at the boundary is given by the larg…
We show that the reformulation of the geometric Robinson-Schensted-Knuth (gRSK) correspondence via local moves, introduced in \cite{OSZ14} can be extended to cases where the input matrix is replaced by more general polygonal, Young-diagram-like, arrays of the form $\polygon$. We also show that a rearrangement of the sequence of the local moves gives rise to a geometric version of the polynuclear growth model (PNG). These reformulations are used to obtain integral formulae for the Laplace transform of the joint distribution of the point-to-point partition functions of the log-gamma polymer at d…
We study the rotor router model and two deterministic sandpile models. For the rotor router model in $\mathbb{Z}^d$, Levine and Peres proved that the limiting shape of the growth cluster is a sphere. For the other two models, only bounds in dimension 2 are known. A unified approach for these models with a new parameter $h$ (the initial number of particles at each site), allows to prove a number of new limiting shape results in any dimension $d \geq 1$. For the rotor router model, the limiting shape is a sphere for all values of $h$. For one of the sandpile models, and $h=2d-2$ (the maximal val…
The extended Airy kernel describes the space-time correlation functions for the Airy process, which is the limiting process for a polynuclear growth model. The Airy functions themselves are given by integrals in which the exponents have a cubic singularity, arising from the coalescence of two saddle points in an asymptotic analysis. Pearcey functions are given by integrals in which the exponents have a quartic singularity, arising from the coalescence of three saddle points. A corresponding Pearcey kernel appears in a random matrix model and a Brownian motion model for a fixed time. This paper…
We present limiting shape results for a non-abelian variant of the abelian sandpile growth model (ASGM), some of which have no parallel in the ASGM. One of our limiting shapes is an octagon. In our model, mass spreads from the origin by the toppling rule in Zhang's sandpile model. Previously, several limiting shape results have been obtained for the ASGM using abelianness and monotonicity as main tools. As both properties fail for our model, we use a new proof technique: in our main proof, we introduce several cellular automata to mimic our growth model.
In [Matveev-Petrov 2016](arXiv:1504.00666) a $q$-deformed Robinson-Schensted-Knuth algorithm ($q$RSK) was introduced. In this article we give reformulations of this algorithm in terms of the Noumi-Yamada description, growth diagrams and local moves. We show that the algorithm is symmetric, namely the output tableaux pairs are swapped in a sense of distribution when the input matrix is transposed. We also formulate a $q$-polymer model based on the $q$RSK, prove the corresponding Burke property, which we use to show a strong law of large numbers for the partition function given stationary bounda…
We study first-passage percolation where edges in the left and right half-planes are assigned values according to different distributions. We show that the asymptotic growth of the resulting inhomogeneous first-passage process obeys a shape theorem, and we express the limiting shape in terms of the limiting shapes for the homogeneous processes for the two weight distributions. We further show that there exist pairs of distributions for which the rate of growth in the vertical direction is strictly larger than the rate of growth of the homogeneous process with either of the two distributions, a…
We introduce a class of one-dimensional discrete space-discrete time stochastic growth models described by a height function $h_t(x)$ with corner initialization. We prove, with one exception, that the limiting distribution function of $h_t(x)$ (suitably centered and normalized) equals a Fredholm determinant previously encountered in random matrix theory. In particular, in the universal regime of large $x$ and large $t$ the limiting distribution is the Fredholm determinant with Airy kernel. In the exceptional case, called the critical regime, the limiting distribution seems not to have previous…
The two-time distribution gives the limiting joint distribution of the heights at two different times of a local 1D random growth model in the curved geometry. This distribution has been computed in a specific model but is expected to be universal in the KPZ universality class. Its marginals are the GUE Tracy-Widom distribution. In this paper we study two limits of the two-time distribution. The first, is the limit of long time separation when the quotient of the two times goes to infinity, and the second, is the short time limit when the quotient goes to zero.
We study the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) growth equation in one dimension with a noise variance $c(t)$ depending on time. We find that for $c(t)\propto t^{-α}$ there is a transition at $α=1/2$. When $α>1/2$, the solution saturates at large times towards a non-universal limiting distribution. When $α<1/2$ the fluctuation field is governed by scaling exponents depending on $α$ and the limiting statistics are similar to the case when $c(t)$ is constant. We investigate this problem using different methods: (1) Elementary changes of variables mapping the time dependent case to variants of the KPZ equ…
In recent work of Baik, Deift and Rains convergence of moments was established for the limiting joint distribution of the lengths of the first k rows in random Young tableaux. The main difficulty was obtaining a good estimate for the tail of the distribution and this was accomplished through a highly nontrival Riemann-Hilbert analysis. Here we give a simpler derivation. The same method is used to establish convergence of moments for a random growth model.
We study directed last-passage percolation on the planar square lattice whose weights have general distributions, or equivalently, queues in series with general service distributions. Each row of the last passage model has its own randomly chosen weight distribution. We first show the existence of the limiting time constant and list its properties. Next we study the problem for models with Bernoulli and exponential weights, for which we already have more precise results. We then present some universality results about the limiting time constant close to the boundary of the quadrant. Close to t…
We determine the long time behavior and the exact order of the tail probability for the maximal displacement of a branching Brownian motion in Euclidean space in terms of the principal eigenvalue of the associated Schrödinger type operator. To establish our results, we show a sharp and locally uniform growth order of the Feynman-Kac semigroup.
This dissertation develops, for several families of statistical mechanical and random growth models, techniques for analyzing infinite-volume asymptotics. In the statistical mechanical setting, we focus on the low-temperature phases of spin glasses and directed polymers, wherein the ensembles exhibit localization which is physically phenomenological. We quantify this behavior in several ways and establish connections to properties of the limiting free energy. We also consider two popular zero-temperature polymer models, namely first- and last-passage percolation. For these random growth models…
We study directed last passage percolation on the first quadrant of the planar square lattice whose weights have general distributions, or equivalently, ./G/1 queues in series. The service time distributions of the servers vary randomly which constitutes a random environment for the model. Equivalently, each row of the last passage model has its own randomly chosen weight distribution. We investigate the limiting time constant close to the boundary of the quadrant. Close to the y-axis, where the number of random distributions averaged over stays large, the limiting time constant takes the same…
We present a general approach to study a class of random growth models in $n$-dimensional Euclidean space. These models are designed to capture basic growth features which are expected to manifest at the mesoscopic level for several classical self-interacting processes originally defined at the microscopic scale. It includes once-reinforced random walk with strong reinforcement, origin-excited random walk, and few others, for which the set of visited vertices is expected to form a "limiting shape". We prove an averaging principle that leads to such shape theorem. The limiting shape can be comp…
Superpositions of Ornstein-Uhlenbeck type (supOU) processes provide a rich class of stationary stochastic processes for which the marginal distribution and the dependence structure may be modeled independently. We show that they can also display intermittency, a phenomenon affecting the rate of growth of moments. To do so, we investigate the limiting behavior of integrated supOU processes with finite variance. After suitable normalization four different limiting processes may arise depending on the decay of the correlation function and on the characteristic triplet of the marginal distribution…
We consider Gibbs distributions on finite random plane trees with bounded branching. We show that as the order of the tree grows to infinity, the distribution of any finite neighborhood of the root of the tree converges to a limit. We compute the limiting distribution explicitly and study its properties. We introduce an infinite random tree consistent with these limiting distributions and show that it satisfies a certain form of the Markov property. We also study the growth of this tree and prove several limit theorems including a diffusion approximation.
We investigate the limiting behavior of random tree growth in preferential attachment models. The tree stems from a root, and we add vertices to the system one-by-one at random, according to a rule which depends on the degree distribution of the already existing tree. The so-called weight function, in terms of which the rule of attachment is formulated, is such that each vertex in the tree can have at most K children. We define the concept of a certain random measure mu on the leaves of the limiting tree, which captures a global property of the tree growth in a natural way. We prove that the H…
The Internal Diffusion Limited Aggregation has been introduced by Diaconis and Fulton in 1991. It is a growth model defined on an infinite set and associated to a Markov chain on this set. We focus here on sets which are finitely generated groups with exponential growth. We prove a shape theorem for the Internal DLA on such groups associated to symmetric random walks. For that purpose, we introduce a new distance associated to the Green function, which happens to have some interesting properties. In the case of homogeneous trees, we also get the right order for the fluctuations of that model a…
We consider a class of density-dependent branching processes which generalises exponential, logistic and Gompertz growth. A population begins with a single individual, grows exponentially initially, and then growth may slow down as the population size moves towards a carrying capacity. At a time while the population is still growing superlinearly, a fixed number of individuals are sampled and their coalescent tree is drawn. Taking the sampling time and carrying capacity simultaneously to infinity, we prove convergence of the coalescent tree to a limiting tree which is in a sense universal over…
We start by studying the distribution of (cyclically reduced) elements of the free groups with respect to their abelianization. We derive an explicit generating function, and a limiting distribution, by means of certain results (of independent interest) on Chebyshev polynomials; we also prove that the reductions $\mod p$ ($p$ -- an arbitrary prime) of these classes are asymptotically equidistributed, and we study the deviation from equidistribution. We extend our techniques to a more general setting and use them to study the statistical properties of long cycles (and paths) on regular (directe…
We study SDEs arising from limiting fluctuations in a $(2+1)$-dimensional surface growth model called the Whittaker driven particle system, which is believed to be in the anisotropic Kardar--Parisi--Zhang class. The main result of this paper proves an irrelevance of nonlinearity in the surface growth model in the continuum by weak convergence in a path space; the first instance of this irrelevance is obtained recently for this model in terms of the covariance functions along certain diverging characteristics. With the same limiting scheme, we prove that the derived SDEs converge in distributio…
Our principal aim is to observe the Markov discrete-time process of population growth with long-living trajectory. First we study asymptotical decay of generating function of Galton-Watson process for all cases as the Basic Lemma. Afterwards we get a Differential analogue of the Basic Lemma. This Lemma plays main role in our discussions throughout the paper. Hereupon we improve and supplement classical results concerning Galton-Watson process. Further we investigate properties of the population process so called Q-process. In particular we obtain a joint limit law of Q-process and its total st…
Generalized Polya urn models can describe the dynamics of finite populations of interacting genotypes. Three basic questions these models can address are: Under what conditions does a population exhibit growth? On the event of growth, at what rate does the population increase? What is the long-term behavior of the distribution of genotypes? To address these questions, we associate a mean limit ordinary differential equation (ODE) with the urn model. Previously, it has been shown that on the event of population growth, the limiting distribution of genotypes is a connected internally chain recur…
Internal diffusion-limited aggregation is a growth model based on random walk in Z^d. We study how the shape of the aggregate depends on the law of the underlying walk, focusing on a family of walks in Z^2 for which the limiting shape is a diamond. Certain of these walks -- those with a directional bias toward the origin -- have at most logarithmic fluctuations around the limiting shape. This contrasts with the simple random walk, where the limiting shape is a disk and the best known bound on the fluctuations, due to Lawler, is a power law. Our walks enjoy a uniform layering property which sim…
We consider certain Fibonacci-like sequences $(X_n)_{n\geq 0}$ perturbed with a random noise. Our main result is that $\frac{1}{X_n}\sum_{k=0}^{n-1}X_k$ converges in distribution, as $n$ goes to infinity, to a random variable $W$ with Pareto-like distribution tails. We show that $s=\lim_{x\to \infty} \frac{-\log P(W>x)}{\log x}$ is a monotonically decreasing characteristic of the input noise, and hence can serve as a measure of its strength in the model. Heuristically, the heavy-taliped limiting distribution, versus a light-tailed one with $s=+\infty,$ can be interpreted as an evidence support…
These lecture notes discuss several related features of the exactly solvable two-dimensional corner growth model with exponentially distributed weights. A key property of this model is the availability of a fairly explicit stationary version that possesses useful independence properties. With the help of couplings and estimates, we prove the existence of Busemann functions for this model, and the precise values of the longitudinal and transversal fluctuation exponents for the stationary corner growth model. The Busemann functions in turn furnish extremals for variational formulas that describe…
