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We have seen that, on the lattice, the curves γ may be ‘grown’ through a discrete exploration process. The Loewner process is the continuum version of this. Because of Property 3.2 it suffices to describe this in a standard domain , which is taken to be the upper half plane H, with the points r1 and r2 being the origin and infinity, respectively.
The first thing to notice is that, although on the honeycomb lattice the growing path does not intersect itself, in the continuum limit it might (although it still should not cross itself.) This means that there may be regions enclosed by the path which are not on the path but nevertheless are not reachable from infinity without crossing it. We call the union of the set of such points, together with the curve itself, up to time t, the hull Kt. (This is a slightly different usage of this term from that in the physics percolation literature.) It is the complement of the connected component of the half plane which includes ∞, itself denoted by H Kt. See Fig. 4.
(2K)
Fig. 4. Schematic view of a trace and its hull.
Another property which often holds in the half-plane is that of reflection invariance: the distribution of lattice paths starting from the origin and ending at ∞ is invariant under x → −x. For the lattice paths in the O (n) model discussed in Section 2.2 this follows from the symmetry of the underlying weights, but for the boundaries of the FK clusters in the Potts model it is a consequence of duality. Not all simple curves in lattice models have this property. For example, if we consider the three-state Potts model in which the spins on the negative and positive real axes are fixed to different values, there is a simple lattice curve which forms the outer boundary of the spin cluster containing the positive real axis. This is not the same as the boundary of the spin cluster containing the negative real axis, and it is not in general symmetric under reflections.
Since H Kt is simply connected, by the Riemann mapping theorem it can be mapped into the standard domain H by an analytic function gt (z). Because this preserves the real axis outside Kt it is in fact real analytic. It is not unique, but can be made so by imposing the behaviour as z → ∞
gt(z) | (15) |
It can be shown that, as the path grows, the coefficient of 1/z is monotonic increasing (essentially it is the electric dipole moment of Kt and its mirror image in the real axis). Therefore, we may reparametrise time so that this coefficient is 2t. (The factor 2 is conventional.) Note that the length of the curve is not be a useful parametrisation in the continuum limit, since the curve is a fractal.
The function gt (z) maps the whole boundary of Kt onto part of the real axis. In particular, it maps the growing tip τt to a real point at. Any point on the real axis outside Kt remains on the real axis. As the path grows, the point at moves on the real axis. For the path to describe a curve, it must always grow only at its tip, and this means that the function at must be continuous, but not necessarily differentiable.
A simple but instructive example is when γ is a straight line growing vertically upwards from a fixed point a. In this case
gt(z)=a+((z-a)2+4t)1/2. | (16) |
This satisfies (15), and . More complicated deterministic examples can be found [18]. In particular, at
t1/2 describes a straight line growing at a fixed angle to the real axis.
Loewner’s idea [4] was to describe the path γ and the evolution of the tip τt in terms of the evolution of the conformal mapping gt (z). It turns out that the equation of motion for gt (z) is simple
| (17) |
This is Loewner’s equation. The idea of the proof is straightforward. Imagine evolving the path for a time t, and then for a further short time δt. The image of Kt + δt under gt is a short vertical line above the point at on the real axis. Thus, we can write, using (16)
gt+δt(z)≈at+((gt(z)-at)2+4δt)1/2. | (18) |
Differentiating with respect to δt and then letting δt → 0, we obtain (17).
Note that, even if at is not differentiable (as is the case for SLE), (17) gives for each point z0 a solution gt (z0) which is differentiable with respect to t, up to the time when gt (z0) = at. This is the time when z0 is first included in Kt. However, it is sometimes (see Section 5) useful to normalise the Loewner mapping differently, defining gˆt (z) = gt (z) − at, which always maps the growing tip τt to the origin. If at is not differentiable, neither is gˆt, and the Loewner equation should be written in differential form as dgˆt = (2dt/gˆt) − dat.
Given a growing path, we can determine the hull Kt and hence, in principle, the function gt (z) and thereby at = gt (τt). Conversely, given at we can integrate (17) to find gt (z) and hence in determine the curve (although proving that this inverse problem gives a curve is not easy).
3.3. Schramm–Loewner evolution
In the case that we are interested in, γ is a random curve, so that at is a random continuous function. What is the measure on at? This is answered by the following remarkable result, due to Schramm [5]:
Theorem 3.1
If Properties 3.1–3.2 hold, together with reflection symmetry, then at is proportional to a standard Brownian motion.
That is
| (19) |
so that at
= 0,
(at1-at2)2
=κ|t1-t2|. The only undetermined parameter is κ, the diffusion constant. It will turn out that different values of κ correspond to different universality classes of critical behaviour.
The idea behind the proof is once again simple. As before, consider growing the curve for a time t1, giving γ1, and denote the remainder γ γ1 = γ2. Property 3.1 tells us that the conditional measure on γ2 given γ1 is the same as the measure on γ2 in the domain H
Kt1, which, by Property 3.2, induces the same measure on gt1(γ2) in the domain H, shifted by at1. In terms of the function at this means that the probability law of at-at1, for t > t1, is the same as the law of at-t1. This implies that all the increments Δn ≡ a(n+1)δt − anδt are independent identically distributed random variables, for all δt > 0. The only process that satisfies this is Brownian motion with a possible drift term:
. Reflection symmetry then implies that α = 0.
3.4. Simple properties of SLE
3.4.1. Phases of SLE
Many of the results discussed in this section have been proved by Rohde and Schramm [19]. First, we address the question of how the trace (the trajectory of τt) looks for different values of κ. For κ = 0, it is a vertical straight line. As κ increases, the trace should randomly turn to the L or R more frequently. However, it turns out that there are qualitative differences at critical values of κ. To see this, let us first study the process on the real axis. Let xt = gt (x0) − at be the distance between the image at time t of a point which starts at x0 and the image at of the tip. It obeys the stochastic equation
| (20) |
Physicists often write such an equation as where ηt is ‘white noise’ of strength κ. Of course this does not make sense since xt is not differentiable. Such equations are always to be interpreted in the ‘Ito sense,’ that is, as the limit as δt → 0 of the forward difference equation
.
Eq. (20) is known as the Bessel process. (If we set Rt = (D − 1)1/2xt/2 and κ2 = 4/(D − 1) it describes the distance Rt from the origin of a Brownian particle in D dimensions.) The point xt is repelled from the origin but it is also subject to a random force. Its ultimate fate can be inferred from the following crude argument: if we ignore the random force, , while, in the absence of the repulsive term,
. Thus, for κ < 4 the repulsive force wins and the particle escapes to infinity, while for κ > 4 the noise dominates and the particle collides with the origin in finite time (at which point the equation breaks down). A more careful analysis confirms this. What does this collision signify (see Fig. 5) in terms of the behaviour of the trace? In Fig. 6, we show a trace which is about to hit the real axis at the point x0, thus engulfing a whole region. This is visible from infinity only through a very small opening, which means that, under gt, it gets mapped to a very small region. In fact, as the tip τt approaches x0, the size of the image of this region shrinks to zero. When the gap closes, the whole region enclosed by the trace, as well as τt and x0, are mapped in to the single point at, which means, in particular, that xt → 0. The above argument shows that for κ < 4 this never happens: the trace never hits the real axis (with probability 1). For the same reason, it neither hits itself. Thus, for κ < 4 the trace γ is a simple curve.
(1K)
Fig. 5. A hull evolved from a0 for time t1, then to infinity. The measure on the image of the rest of the curve under gt1 is the same, according to the postulates of SLE, as a hull evolved from at1 to ∞.