Random Growth Models

The link between a particular class of growth processes and random matrices was established in the now famous 1999 article of Baik, Deift, and Johansson on the length of the longest increasing subsequence of a random permutation. During the past ten years, this connection has been worked out in detail and led to an improved understanding of the large scale properties of one-dimensional growth models. The reader will find a commented list of references at the end. Our objective is to provide an introduction highlighting random matrices. From the outset it should be emphasized that this connection is fragile. Only certain aspects, and only for specific models, the growth process can be reexpressed in terms of partition functions also appearing in random matrix theory.Comment: Review paper; 24 pages, 4 figures; Minor correction

Hydrodynamic limit equation for a lozenge tiling Glauber dynamics

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 $\mu$ 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.Comment: 31 pages, 8 figures. v2: typos corrected, some proofs clarified. To appear on Annales Henri Poincar

Anisotropic Growth of Random Surfaces in 2 + 1 Dimensions

We construct a family of stochastic growth models in 2 + 1 dimensions, that belong to the anisotropic KPZ class. Appropriate projections of these models yield 1 + 1 dimensional growth models in the KPZ class and random tiling models. We show that correlation functions associated to our models have determinantal structure, and we study large time asymptotics for one of the models. The main asymptotic results are: (1) The growing surface has a limit shape that consists of facets interpolated by a curved piece. (2) The one-point fluctuations of the height function in the curved part are asymptotically normal with variance of order ln(t) for time t ≫ 1. (3) There is a map of the (2 + 1)-dimensional space-time to the upper half-plane H such that on space-like submanifolds the multi-point fluctuations of the height function are asymptotically equal to those of the pullback of the Gaussian free (massless) field on H

Local Statistics and Shuffling for Dimers on a Square-Hexagon Lattice

We study the dimer model on special subgraphs of the square hexagon lattice called "tower graphs" of size $N$. Using integrable probability techniques, we confirm that as $N \rightarrow \infty$, the local statistics are translation invariant Gibbs measures, as conjectured by Kenyon-Okounkov-Sheffield. We also present a 2+1-dimensional discrete time growth process, whose time $N$ distribution is exactly the dimer model on the size $N$ tower, and we compute the current of this growth process and confirm that the model belongs to the Anisotropic KPZ universality class.Comment: 30 pages, 17 figure

Large Scale Stochastic Dynamics

The goal of this workshop was to explore the recent advances in the mathematical understanding of the macroscopic properties which emerge on large space-time scales from interacting microscopic particle systems. There were 53 participants, including 4 postdocs and graduate students, working in diverse intertwining areas of probability and statistical mechanics. During the meeting, 24 talks of 50 minutes were scheduled and an evening session was organised with 10 more short talks of 10 minutes, mostly by younger participants. These talks addressed the following topics: hydrodynamic limits and hydrodynamic fluctuations with a special emphasis on KPZ fluctuations, scaling limits in percolation and random walks, approach to equilibrium in reversible systems with a strong focus on kinetically constrained dynamics