Height fluctuation for Lozenge Tilings of Polygons

Source abstract

We establish Gaussian free field fluctuations for uniformly random lozenge tilings of simply connected polygonal domains with $3d$ sides whose directions cycle through the three lattice directions. More precisely, assuming that the liquid region is connected and that the boundary data do not force the height at any interior point, we prove that the fluctuations of centered height function converge to the Gaussian free field in the liquid region, confirming a prediction of Kenyon and Okounkov from 2007. We introduce a tiling action function that encodes the geometry of the limit shape through its critical points. The action function has a complex conjugate pair of critical points in the liquid region, repeated real critical points on the arctic boundary, and distinct real critical points in the frozen region. Using this tiling action function, we construct an approximation to the inverse Kasteleyn matrix in terms of explicit single-contour and double-contour integrals and prove that the approximation is uniform throughout the polygonal domain. The convergence to the Gaussian free field then follows from standard kernel computations.