Three faces of random walks in hyperbolic domain: BKT, Lifshitz tails, and KPZ
Abstract
We show that continuous random walks (diffusion) in the Poincar\'{e} hyperbolic upper halfplane provide a unifying description of three seemingly unrelated phenomena: (i) the non-analytic divergence of the correlation length at the Berezinskii--Kosterlitz--Thouless (BKT) transition; (ii) the appearance of the Kardar--Parisi--Zhang (KPZ) exponent in the fluctuational behavior of stretched random walks constrained above an impermeable disc; and (iii) the emergence of Lifshitz tails (LT) in 1D statistics of rare events. We adapt the renormalization-group equations originally developed for the Efimov effect in a 2D conformally invariant potential to the case of diffusion in , thereby reproducing the BKT--type divergence of the correlation length. In frameworks of the same model we derive the KPZ--type behavior for the survival probability of stretched random walks near the boundary of using scaling arguments, WKB--type approach, and numerical analysis. We demonstrate that LT emerge naturally in a deterministic large-deviation random walks' statistics in via instanton approach, which rhymes with the rare-event behavior of 1D diffusion in the array of traps with the Poisson distribution. We conjecture that the dominant contribution to the statistics of paths responsible for BKT--like physics emerges from trajectories pushed to large-deviation stretched regime.
Cite
@article{arxiv.2511.18510,
title = {Three faces of random walks in hyperbolic domain: BKT, Lifshitz tails, and KPZ},
author = {Daniil Fedotov and Sergei Nechaev},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.18510},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
20 pages, 4 figures (detected errors have been fixed)