Macroscopic behavior of Lipschitz random surfaces (Q6151640)

The authors of this detailed and comprehensive work study the macroscopic behavior of models of Lipschitz random surfaces, that is, random Lipschitz functions from \(\mathbb{Z}^d\) to \(\mathbb{Z}\) or \(\mathbb{R}\). An essential innovation is that random surface models with nonpair interactions of long- and infinite-range are considered, among others. Examples include the height functions of dimer models and six-vertex models, as well as the uniformly random \(K\)-Lipschitz function. So, the results cover at least: uniformly random graph homomorphisms from \(\mathbb{Z}^d\) to a \(k\)-regular tree for any \(k\geq 2\) and Lipschitz potentials which satisfy the so-called FKG lattice condition, and the latter includes perturbations of dimer- and six-vertex models and of Lipschitz simply attractive potentials introduced by Sheffield. The authors are interested in the response of these models to boundary conditions. It is generally expected that the macroscopic limit of a random surface under the influence of boundary conditions is governed by a variational principle, and this is confirmed in the paper. The work contains three valuable results. The main result establishes strict convexity of the surface tension, which implies uniqueness for the limiting macroscopic profile if the model of interest is monotone in the boundary conditions. This solves conjectures of Sheffield and of Menz and Tassy. Auxiliary to this, the authors prove several results which may be of independent interest, and which do not rely on the model being monotone. This includes existence and topological properties of the specific free energy, as well as a characterization of its minimizers. They also prove a general large deviations principle which concerns both the macroscopic profile of a height function, as well as the local statistics of the height function within a region of macroscopic size. This implies the classical variational principle. Open questions are also formulated.