Local KPZ behavior under arbitrary scaling limits

One of the main difficulties in proving convergence of discrete models of surface growth to the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation in dimensions higher than one is that the correct way to take a scaling limit, so that the limit is nontrivial, is not known in a rigorous sense. To understand KPZ growth without being hindered by this issue, this article introduces a notion of "local KPZ behavior", which roughly means that the instantaneous growth of the surface at a point decomposes into the sum of a Laplacian term, a gradient squared term, a noise term that behaves like white noise, and a remainder term that is negligible compared to the other three terms and their sum. The main result is that for a general class of surfaces, which contains the model of directed polymers in a random environment as a special case, local KPZ behavior occurs under arbitrary scaling limits, in any dimension.