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The pinned half-space Airy line ensemble

Probability 2026-01-09 v1 Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

Half-space models in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality class exhibit rich boundary phenomena that alter the asymptotic behavior familiar from their full-space counterparts. A distinguishing feature of these systems is the presence of a boundary parameter that governs a transition between subcritical, critical, and supercritical regimes, characterized by different scaling exponents and fluctuation statistics. In this paper we construct the pinned half-space Airy line ensemble Ahs;\mathcal{A}^{\mathrm{hs}; \infty} on [0,)[0,\infty) -- a natural half-space analogue of the Airy line ensemble -- expected to arise as the universal scaling limit of supercritical half-space KPZ models. The ensemble Ahs;\mathcal{A}^{\mathrm{hs}; \infty} is obtained as the weak limit of the critical half-space Airy line ensembles Ahs;ϖ\mathcal{A}^{\mathrm{hs}; \varpi} introduced in arXiv:2505.01798 as the boundary parameter ϖ\varpi tends to infinity. We show that Ahs;\mathcal{A}^{\mathrm{hs}; \infty} has a Pfaffian point process structure with an explicit correlation kernel and that, after a parabolic shift, it satisfies a one-sided Brownian Gibbs property described by pairwise pinned Brownian motions. Far from the origin, Ahs;\mathcal{A}^{\mathrm{hs}; \infty} converges to the standard Airy line ensemble, while at the origin its distribution coincides with that of the ordered eigenvalues (with doubled multiplicity) of the stochastic Airy operator with β=4\beta = 4.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2601.04546,
  title  = {The pinned half-space Airy line ensemble},
  author = {Evgeni Dimitrov and Christian Serio and Zongrui Yang},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2601.04546},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

58 pages, 1 figure

R2 v1 2026-07-01T08:55:27.867Z