English

Two-time spatial decorrelation for the flat KPZ fixed point

Probability 2026-07-19 v1

Abstract

We establish quantitative two-time spatial decorrelation for the Kardar--Parisi--Zhang fixed point with flat initial data. For every s,t>0s,t>0,there exist constants C,c>0C,c>0 such that Cov(h(t,x),h(s,0))Cexp{cx3},x1. \big|{\rm Cov}(\mathfrak{h}(t,x),\mathfrak{h}(s,0))\big| \le C\exp\{-c|x|^3\},\qquad |x|\ge1. Unlike the fixed-time covariance, which is governed directly by the Airy1_1 process, the two-time covariance involves the nonlinear variational evolution of the entire earlier height profile. Our proof combines cubic-exponential mixing of the Airy1_1 process with a uniform localization estimate for intermediate optimizers in the directed landscape. As a consequence, the centered spatial averages, normalized by N1/2N^{1/2}, converge in finite-dimensional distributions to a centered Gaussian process whose covariance is the space-integrated two-time correlation of the flat KPZ fixed point.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2607.17113,
  title  = {Two-time spatial decorrelation for the flat KPZ fixed point},
  author = {Le Chen and Fei Pu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2607.17113},
  year   = {2026}
}