The Airy process A(t), introduced by Prähofer and Spohn, is the limiting stationary process for a polynuclear growth model. Adler and van Moerbeke found a PDE in the variables s_1, s_2, and t for the probability that A(0)<s_1 and A(t)<s_2. Using this they were able, assuming the truth of a certain conjecture and appropriate uniformity, to obtain the first few terms of an asymptotic expansion for this probability as t->infinity, with fixed s_1 and s_2. We shall show that the expansion can be obtained by using the Fredholm determinant representation for the probability. The main ingredients are formulas obtained by the author and C. A. Tracy in the derivation of the Painlevé II representation for the distribution function F_2 plus a few others obtained in the same way.
We obtain uniform asymptotics for deformed Airy kernel determinants, which arise in models of finite temperature free fermions and which characterize the narrow wedge solution of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation. The asymptotics for the determinants yield uniform initial data for an associated family of solutions to the Korteweg-de Vries equation, and uniform lower tail asymptotics for the narrow wedge solution of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation.
In this paper we compute some of the higher order terms in the large-t asymptotic expansion of the Airy process two-point function, extending the previous work of Adler and van Moerbeke and Widom. We prove that it is possible to represent any order asymptotic approximation as a polynomial and integrals of the Hastings-McLeod Painlevé II function and its first derivative. Further, for up to tenth order we give this asymptotic approximation as a linear combination of the Tracy-Widom GUE density function f_2 and its derivatives. As a corollary to this, the asymptotic covariance is expressed up to…
We study $n$ non-intersecting Brownian motions, corresponding to the eigenvalues of an $n\times n$ Hermitian Brownian motion. At the boundary of their limit shape we find that only three universal processes can arise: the Pearcey process close to merging points, the Airy line ensemble at edges and a novel determinantal process describing the transition from the Pearcey process to the Airy line ensemble. The three cases are distinguished by a remarkably simple integral condition. Our results hold under very mild assumptions, in particular we do not require any kind of convergence of the initial…
In this paper, we answer a question posed by Kurt Johansson, to find a PDE for the joint distribution of the Airy Process. The latter is a continuous stationary process, describing the motion of the outermost particle of the Dyson Brownian motion, when the number of particles get large, with space and time appropriately rescaled. The question reduces to an asymptotic analysis on the equation governing the joint probability of the eigenvalues of coupled Gaussian Hermitian matrices. The differential equations lead to the asymptotic behavior of the joint distribution and the correlation for the A…
We consider the probability that no points lie on $g$ large intervals in the bulk of the Airy point process. We make a conjecture for all the terms in the asymptotics up to and including the oscillations of order $1$, and we prove this conjecture for $g=1$.
We study the local asymptotics at the edge for particle systems arising from: (i) eigenvalues of sums of unitarily invariant random Hermitian matrices and (ii) signatures corresponding to decompositions of tensor products of representations of the unitary group. Our method treats these two models in parallel, and is based on new formulas for observables described in terms of a special family of lifts, which we call supersymmetric lifts, of Schur functions and multivariate Bessel functions. We obtain explicit expressions for a class of supersymmetric lifts inspired by determinantal formulas for…
We study the multipoint distribution of stationary half-space last passage percolation with exponentially weighted times. We derive both finite-size and asymptotic results for this distribution. In the latter case we observe a new one-parameter process we call half-space Airy stat. It is a one-parameter generalization of the Airy stat process of Baik-Ferrari-Péché, which is recovered far away from the diagonal. All these results extend the one-point results previously proven by the authors.
We prove that the Airy process, A(t), locally fluctuates like a Brownian motion. In the same spirit we also show that in a certain scaling limit, the so called discrete polynuclear growth (PNG) process behaves like a Brownian motion.
We obtain a formula for the $n$-dimensional distributions of the Airy$_1$ process in terms of a Fredholm determinant on $L^2(\rr)$, as opposed to the standard formula which involves extended kernels, on $L^2(\{1,...,n\}\times\rr)$. The formula is analogous to an earlier formula of [PS02] for the Airy$_2$ process. Using this formula we are able to prove that the Airy$_1$ process is Hölder continuous with exponent $\frac12-$ and that it fluctuates locally like a Brownian motion. We also explain how the same methods can be used to obtain the analogous results for the Airy$_2$ process. As a conseq…
This paper gives a PDE for multi-time joint probability of the Airy process, which generalizes Adler and van Moerbeke's result on the 2-time case. As an intermediate step, the PDE for the multi-time joint probability of the Dyson Brownian motion is also given.
The Airy process is characterized by its finite-dimensional distribution functions. We show that each finite-dimensional distribution function is expressible in terms of a solution to a system of differential equations.
The Ferrari-Spohn diffusion process arises as limit process for the 2D Ising model as well as random walks with area penalty. Motivated by the 3D Ising model, we consider $M$ such diffusions conditioned not to intersect. We show that the top process converges to the Airy$_2$ process as $M\to\infty$. We then explain the relation with the 3D Ising model and present some conjectures about it.
We express the gap probabilities of the tacnode process as the ratio of two Fredholm determinants; the denominator is the standard Tracy-Widom distribution, while the numerator is the Fredholm determinant of a very explicit kernel constructed with Airy functions and exponentials. The formula allows us to apply the theory of numerical evaluation of Fredholm determinants and thus produce numerical results for the gap probabilities. In particular we investigate numerically how, in different regimes, the Pearcey process degenerates to the Airy one, and the tacnode degenerates to the Pearcey and Ai…
Putting dynamics into random matrix models leads to finitely many nonintersecting Brownian motions on the real line for the eigenvalues, as was discovered by Dyson. Applying scaling limits to the random matrix models, combined with Dyson's dynamics, then leads to interesting, infinite-dimensional diffusions for the eigenvalues. This paper studies the relationship between two of the models, namely the Airy and Pearcey processes and more precisely shows how to approximate the multi-time statistics for the Pearcey process by the one of the Airy process with the help of a PDE governing the gap pro…
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 the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process, a model in the KPZ universality class. We focus on the fluctuations of particle positions starting with certain deterministic initial conditions. For large time t, one has regions with constant and linearly decreasing density. The fluctuations on these two regions are given by the Airy_1 and Airy_2 processes, whose one-point distributions are the GOE and GUE Tracy-Widom distributions of random matrix theory. In this paper we analyze the transition region between these two regimes and obtain the transition process. Its one-point distr…
The results of Amir-Corwin-Quastel, Calabrese-Le Doussal-Rosso, Dotsenko, and Sasamoto-Spohn imply that the one-point distribution of the solution of the KPZ equation with the narrow wedge initial condition coincides with that for a multiplicative statistics of the Airy determinantal random point process. Taking Taylor coefficients of the two sides yields moment identities. We provide a simple direct proof of those via a combinatorial match of their multivariate integral representations.
We prove that the, appropriately rescaled, boundary of the north polar region in the Aztec diamond converges to the Airy process. The proof uses certain determinantal point processes given by the extended Krawtchouk kernel. We also prove a version of Propp's conjecture concerning the structure of the tiling at the center of the Aztec diamond.
In a celebrated paper, Dyson shows that the spectrum of an n\times n random Hermitian matrix, diffusing according to an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, evolves as n noncolliding Brownian motions held together by a drift term. The universal edge and bulk scalings for Hermitian random matrices, applied to the Dyson process, lead to the Airy and Sine processes. In particular, the Airy process is a continuous stationary process, describing the motion of the outermost particle of the Dyson Brownian motion, when the number of particles gets large, with space and time appropriately rescaled. In this pape…
We show there is a last path at the rough smooth boundary of the two-periodic Aztec diamond with parameter $a\in (0,1)$ that, suitably rescaled, converges to the Airy process, under the condition that $a$ tends to zero as the size of the Aztec diamond tends to infinity at a certain rate. This condition causes the rough region to have a thin, mesoscopic width. We also show that the dimers are described by a discrete Bessel kernel when the width is only of microscopic size.
Let $\aip(t)$ be the Airy$_2$ process. We show that the random variable [\sup_{t\leqα}\{aip(t)-t^2}+\min{0,α}^2] has the same distribution as the one-point marginal of the Airy$_{2\to1}$ process at time $α$. These marginals form a family of distributions crossing over from the GUE Tracy-Widom distribution $F_{\rm GUE}(x)$ for the Gaussian Unitary Ensemble of random matrices, to a rescaled version of the GOE Tracy-Widom distribution $F_{\rm GOE}(4^{1/3}x)$ for the Gaussian Orthogonal Ensemble. Furthermore, we show that for every $α$ the distribution has the same right tail decay $e^{-(4/3)x^{3/…
We study the decay of the covariance of the Airy$_1$ process, $\mathcal{A}_1$, a stationary stochastic process on $\mathbb{R}$ that arises as a universal scaling limit in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality class. We show that the decay is super-exponential and determine the leading order term in the exponent by showing that $\textrm{Cov}(\mathcal{A}_1(0),\mathcal{A}_1(u))= e^{-(\frac{4}{3}+o(1))u^3}$ as $u\to\infty$. The proof employs a combination of probabilistic techniques and integrable probability estimates. The upper bound uses the connection of $\mathcal{A}_1$ to planar exponent…
A point process is said to be rigid if for any bounded domain in the phase space, the number of particles in the domain is almost surely determined by the restriction of the configuration to the complement of our bounded domain. The main result of this paper is that determinantal point processes with the Airy, the Bessel and the Gamma kernels are rigid. The proof follows the scheme of Ghosh [6], Ghosh and Peres [7]: the main step is the construction of a sequence of additive statistics with variance going to zero.
Consider $n+m$ nonintersecting Brownian bridges, with $n$ of them leaving from 0 at time $t=-1$ and returning to 0 at time $t=1$, while the $m$ remaining ones (wanderers) go from $m$ points $a_i$ to $m$ points $b_i$. First, we keep $m$ fixed and we scale $a_i,b_i$ appropriately with $n$. In the large-$n$ limit, we obtain a new Airy process with wanderers, in the neighborhood of $\sqrt{2n}$, the approximate location of the rightmost particle in the absence of wanderers. This new process is governed by an Airy-type kernel, with a rational perturbation. Letting the number $m$ of wanderers tend to…
For a wide class of Hermitian random matrices, the limit distribution of the eigenvalues close to the largest one is governed by the Airy point process. In such ensembles, the limit distribution of the k-th largest eigenvalue is given in terms of the Airy kernel Fredholm determinant or in terms of Tracy-Widom formulas involving solutions of the Painlevé II equation. Limit distributions for quantities involving two or more near-extreme eigenvalues, such as the gap between the k-th and the \ell-th largest eigenvalue or the sum of the k largest eigenvalues, can be expressed in terms of Fredholm d…
Consider N Brownian bridges B_i:[-N,N] -> R, B_i(-N) = B_i(N) = 0, 1 <= i <= N, conditioned not to intersect. The edge-scaling limit of this system is obtained by taking a limit as N -> infinity of these curves scaled around (0,2^{1/2} N) horizontally by a factor of N^{2/3} and vertically by N^{1/3}. If a parabola is added to each limit curve, an x-translation invariant process sometimes called the multi-line Airy process is obtained. We prove the existence of a version of this process (which we call the Airy line ensemble) in which curves are a.s. everywhere continuous and non-intersecting. T…
In this paper we consider the stochastic six-vertex model in the quadrant started with step initial data. After a long time $T$, it is known that the one-point height function fluctuations are of order $T^{1/3}$ and governed by the Tracy-Widom distribution. We prove that the two-point distribution of the height function, rescaled horizontally by $T^{2/3}$ and vertically by $T^{1/3}$, converges to the two-point distribution of the Airy process. The starting point of this result is a recent connection discovered by Borodin-Bufetov-Wheeler between the stochastic six-vertex model and the ascending…
We show that the supremum of the average of the Airy process and its time reversal minus a parabola is distributed as the maximum of two independent GUE Tracy-Widom random variables. The proof is obtained by considering a directed last passage percolation model with a rotational symmetry in two different ways. We also review other known identities between the Airy process and the Tracy-Widom distributions.
We consider a new interacting particle system on the one-dimensional lattice that interpolates between TASEP and Toom's model: A particle cannot jump to the right if the neighboring site is occupied, and when jumping to the left it simply pushes all the neighbors that block its way. We prove that for flat and step initial conditions, the large time fluctuations of the height function of the associated growth model along any space-like path are described by the Airy_1 and Airy_2 processes. This includes fluctuations of the height profile for a fixed time and fluctuations of a tagged particle's …
At a typical cusp point of the disordered region in a random tiling model we expect to see a determinantal process called the Pearcey process in the appropriate scaling limit. However, in certain situations another limiting point process appears that we call the Cusp-Airy process, which is a kind of two sided extension of the Airy kernel point process. We will study this problem in a class of random lozenge tiling models coming from interlacing particle systems. The situation was briefly studied previously by Okounkov and Reshetikhin under the name cuspidal turning point.
We establish an exact mapping between (i) the equilibrium (imaginary time) dynamics of non-interacting fermions trapped in a harmonic potential at temperature $T=1/β$ and (ii) non-intersecting Ornstein-Uhlenbeck (OU) particles constrained to return to their initial positions after time $β$. Exploiting the determinantal structure of the process we compute the universal correlation functions both in the bulk and at the edge of the trapped Fermi gas. The latter corresponds to the top path of the non-intersecting OU particles, and leads us to introduce and study the time-periodic Airy$_2$ process,…
The Airy$_β$ point process, originally introduced by Ramírez, Rider, and Virág, is defined as the spectrum of the stochastic Airy operator $\mathcal{H}_β$ acting on a subspace of $L^2[0,\infty)$ with Dirichlet boundary condition. In this paper we study the coupled family of point processes defined as the eigenvalues of $\mathcal{H}_β$ acting on a subspace of $L^2[t,\infty)$. These point processes are coupled through the Brownian term of $\mathcal{H}_β$. We show that these point processes as a function of $t$ are differentiable with explicitly computable derivative. Moreover when recentered by …
We establish that the static height fluctuations of a particular growth model, the PNG droplet, converges upon proper rescaling to a limit process, which we call the Airy process A(y). The Airy process is stationary, it has continuous sample paths, its single "time" (fixed y) distribution is the Tracy-Widom distribution of the largest eigenvalue of a GUE random matrix, and the Airy process has a slow decay of correlations as y^(-2). Roughly the Airy process describes the last line of Dyson's Brownian motion model for random matrices. Our construction uses a multi-layer version of the PNG model…
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.
It was shown in [J. A. Ramírez, B. Rider and B. Virág. J. Amer. Math. Soc. 24, 919-944 (2011)] that the edge of the spectrum of $β$ ensembles converges in the large $N$ limit to the bottom of the spectrum of the stochastic Airy operator. In the present paper, we obtain a complete description of the bottom of this spectrum when the temperature $1/β$ goes to $\infty$: we show that the point process of appropriately rescaled eigenvalues converges to a Poisson point process on $\mathbb{R}$ of intensity $e^x dx$ and that the eigenfunctions converge to Dirac masses centered at IID points with expone…
We consider the asymmetric simple exclusion process (ASEP) with half-flat initial condition. We show that the one-point marginals of the ASEP height function are described by those of the $\mbox{Airy}_{2 \rightarrow 1}$ process, introduced by Borodin-Ferrari-Sasamoto in (Commun. Pure Appl. Math., 61, 1603-1629, 2008). This result was conjectured by Ortmann-Quastel-Remenik (Ann. Appl. Probab., 26, 507-548), based on an informal asymptotic analysis of exact formulas for generating functions of the half-flat ASEP height function at one spatial point. Our present work provides a fully rigorous der…
Consider n non-intersecting particles on the real line (Dyson Brownian motions), all starting from the origin at time=0, and forced to return to x=0 at time=1. For large n, the average mean density of particles has its support, for each 0<t<1, within the interior of an ellipse. The Airy process is defined as the motion of these non-intersecting Brownian motions for large n, but viewed from an arbitrary point on the ellipse with an appropriate space-time rescaling. Assume now a finite number r of these particles are forced to a different target point. Does it affect the Brownian fluctuations al…
In this paper we study pseudo-processes related to odd-order heat-type equations composed with Lévy stable subordinators. The aim of the article is twofold. We first show that the pseudo-density of the subordinated pseudo-process can be represented as an expectation of damped oscillations with generalized gamma distributed parameters. This stochastic representation also arises as the solution to a fractional diffusion equation, involving a higher-order Riesz-Feller operator, which generalizes the odd-order heat-type equation. We then prove that, if the stable subordinator has a suitable expone…
The purpose of this article is to develop a theory behind the occurrence of "path-integral" kernels in the study of extended determinantal point processes and non-intersecting line ensembles. Our first result shows how determinants involving such kernels arise naturally in studying ratios of partition functions and expectations of multiplicative functionals for ensembles of non-intersecting paths on weighted graphs. Our second result shows how Fredholm determinants with extended kernels (as arise in the study of extended determinantal point processes such as the Airy_2 process) are equal to Fr…
One-dimensional system of Brownian motions called Dyson's model is the particle system with long-range repulsive forces acting between any pair of particles, where the strength of force is $β/2$ times the inverse of particle distance. When $β=2$, it is realized as the Brownian motions in one dimension conditioned never to collide with each other. For any initial configuration, it is proved that Dyson's model with $β=2$ and $N$ particles, $\X(t)=(X_1(t), ..., X_N(t)), t \in [0,\infty), 2 \leq N < \infty$, is determinantal in the sense that any multitime correlation function is given by a determ…
We study random domino tilings of the Aztec diamond with different weights for horizontal and vertical dominoes. A domino tiling of an Aztec diamond can also be described by a particle system which is a determinantal process. We give a relation between the correlation kernel for this process and the inverse Kasteleyn matrix of the Aztec diamond. This gives a formula for the inverse Kasteleyn matrix which generalizes a result of Helfgott. As an application, we investigate the asymptotics of the process formed by the southern dominoes close to the frozen boundary. We find that at the northern bo…
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)…
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…
