Random lozenge tiling at cusps and the Pearcey process

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Lingfu Zhang, UC Berkeley
Fine Hall 224

It has been known since Cohn-Kenyon-Propp (2000) that uniformly random tiling by lozenges exhibits frozen and disordered regions, which are separated by the 'arctic curve'. For a generic simply connected polygonal domain, the microscopic statistics are widely predicted to be universal, being one of (1) discrete sine process inside the disordered region (2) Airy line ensemble around a smooth point of the curve (3) Pearcey process around a cusp of the curve (4) GUE corner process around a tangent point of the curve. These statistics were proved years ago for special domains, using exact formulas; as for universality, much progress was made more recently. In this talk, I will present a proof of the universality of (3), the remaining open case. Our approach is via a refined comparison between tiling and non-intersecting random walks, for which a new universality result of the Pearcey process is also proved. This is joint work with Jiaoyang Huang and Fan Yang.