Contributor info: Dr Sylvain Prolhac

Sylvain Prolhac

SciPost Phys. Lect. Notes 81 (2024) · published 12 June 2024 | Toggle abstract · pdf

These lecture notes, adapted from the habilitation thesis of the author, survey in a first part various exact results obtained in the past few decades about KPZ fluctuations in one dimension, with a special focus on finite volume effects describing the relaxation to its stationary state of a finite system starting from a given initial condition. The second part is more specifically devoted to an approach allowing to express in a simple way the statistics of the current in the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process in terms of a contour integral on a compact Riemann surface, whose infinite genus limit leads to KPZ fluctuations in finite volume.

Sylvain Prolhac

SciPost Phys. 8, 008 (2020) · published 22 January 2020 | Toggle abstract · pdf

The Riemann surface for polylogarithms of half-integer index, which has the topology of an infinite dimensional hypercube, is studied in relation to one-dimensional KPZ universality in finite volume. Known exact results for fluctuations of the KPZ height with periodic boundaries are expressed in terms of meromorphic functions on this Riemann surface, summed over all the sheets of a covering map to an infinite cylinder. Connections to stationary large deviations, particle-hole excitations and KdV solitons are discussed.