Pearcey universality at cusps of polygonal lozenge tilings

Abstract

We study uniformly random lozenge tilings of general simply connected polygons. Under a technical assumption that is presumably generic with respect to polygon shapes, we show that the local statistics around a cusp point of the arctic curve converge to the Pearcey process. This verifies the widely predicted universality of edge statistics in the cusp case. Together with the smooth and tangent cases proved by Aggarwal-Huang and Aggarwal-Gorin, these are believed to be the three types of edge statistics that can arise in a generic polygon. Our proof is via a local coupling of the random tiling with nonintersecting Bernoulli random walks (NBRW). To leverage this coupling, we establish an optimal concentration estimate for the tiling height function around the cusp. As another step and also a result of potential independent interest, we show that the local statistics of NBRW around a cusp converge to the Pearcey process when the initial configuration consists of two parts with proper density growth, via careful asymptotic analysis of the determinantal formulas.