Non-intersecting Brownian bridges in the flat-to-flat geometry

Abstract

We study $N$ vicious Brownian bridges propagating from an initial configuration $\{a_1 < a_2 < \ldots< a_N \}$ at time $t=0$ to a final configuration $\{b_1 < b_2 < \ldots< b_N \}$ at time $t=t_f$, while staying non-intersecting for all $0\leq t \leq t_f$. We first show that this problem can be mapped to a non-intersecting Dyson's Brownian bridges with Dyson index $\beta=2$. For the latter we derive an exact effective Langevin equation that allows to generate very efficiently the vicious bridge configurations. In particular, for the flat-to-flat configuration in the large $N$ limit, where $a_i = b_i = (i-1)/N$, for $i = 1, \cdots, N$, we use this effective Langevin equation to derive an exact Burgers' equation (in the inviscid limit) for the Green's function and solve this Burgers' equation for arbitrary time $0 \leq t\leq t_f$. At certain specific values of intermediate times $t$, such as $t=t_f/2$, $t=t_f/3$ and $t=t_f/4$ we obtain the average density of the flat-to-flat bridge explicitly. We also derive explicitly how the two edges of the average density evolve from time $t=0$ to time $t=t_f$. Finally, we discuss connections to some well known problems, such as the Chern-Simons model, the related Stieltjes-Wigert orthogonal polynomials and the Borodin-Muttalib ensemble of determinantal point processes.