Off-Critical SLE(2) and SLE(4): a Field Theory Approach

Using their relationship with the free boson and the free symplectic fermion, we study the off-critical perturbation of SLE(4) and SLE(2) obtained by adding a mass term to the action. We compute the off-critical statistics of the source in the Loewner equation describing the two dimensional interfaces. In these two cases we show that ratios of massive by massless partition functions, expressible as ratios of regularised determinants of massive and massless Laplacians, are (local) martingales for the massless interfaces. The off-critical drifts in the stochastic source of the Loewner equation are proportional to the logarithmic derivative of these ratios. We also show that massive correlation functions are (local) martingales for the massive interfaces. In the case of massive SLE(4), we use this property to prove a factorisation of the free boson measure.Comment: 30 pages, 1 figures, Published versio

LERW as an example of off-critical SLEs

Two dimensional loop erased random walk (LERW) is a random curve, whose continuum limit is known to be a Schramm-Loewner evolution (SLE) with parameter kappa=2. In this article we study ``off-critical loop erased random walks'', loop erasures of random walks penalized by their number of steps. On one hand we are able to identify counterparts for some LERW observables in terms of symplectic fermions (c=-2), thus making further steps towards a field theoretic description of LERWs. On the other hand, we show that it is possible to understand the Loewner driving function of the continuum limit of off-critical LERWs, thus providing an example of application of SLE-like techniques to models near their critical point. Such a description is bound to be quite complicated because outside the critical point one has a finite correlation length and therefore no conformal invariance. However, the example here shows the question need not be intractable. We will present the results with emphasis on general features that can be expected to be true in other off-critical models.Comment: 45 pages, 2 figure