Fermionic construction of tau functions and random processes

Tau functions expressed as fermionic expectation values are shown to provide a natural and straightforward description of a number of random processes and statistical models involving hard core configurations of identical particles on the integer lattice, like a discrete version simple exclusion processes (ASEP), nonintersecting random walkers, lattice Coulomb gas models and others, as well as providing a powerful tool for combinatorial calculations involving paths between pairs of partitions. We study the decay of the initial step function within the discrete ASEP (d-ASEP) model as an example.