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An Anisotropic Ballistic Deposition Model with Links to the Ulam Problem and the Tracy-Widom Distribution

Satya N. Majumdar·Sergei Nechaev
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Abstract

We compute exactly the asymptotic distribution of scaled height in a (1+1)--dimensional anisotropic ballistic deposition model by mapping it to the Ulam problem of finding the longest nondecreasing subsequence in a random sequence of integers. Using the known results for the Ulam problem, we show that the scaled height in our model has the Tracy-Widom distribution appearing in the theory of random matrices near the edges of the spectrum. Our result supports the hypothesis that various growth models in $(1+1)$ dimensions that belong to the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class perhaps all share the same universal Tracy-Widom distribution for the suitably scaled height variables.

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Satya N. Majumdar, Sergei Nechaev. 2003-07-18. An Anisotropic Ballistic Deposition Model with Links to the Ulam Problem and the Tracy-Widom Distribution. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.69.011103

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