Monomer correlations on the square lattice

Series
Combinatorics Seminar
Time
Friday, April 9, 2010 - 3:05pm for 1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location
Skiles 255
Speaker
Mihai Ciucu – Professor, Indiana University, Bloomington
Organizer
Prasad Tetali
In 1963 Fisher and Stephenson conjectured that the correlation function of two oppositely colored monomers in a sea of dimers on the square lattice is rotationally invariant in the scaling limit. More precisely, the conjecture states that if one of the monomers is fixed and the other recedes to infinity along a fixed ray, the correlation function is asymptotically $C d^(-1/2)$, where $d$ is the Euclidean distance between the monomers and $C$ is a constant independent of the slope of the ray. Shortly afterward Hartwig rigorously determined $C$ when the ray is in a diagonal direction, and this remains the only direction settled in the literature. We generalize Hartwig's result to any finite collection of monomers along a diagonal direction. This can be regarded as a counterpart of a result of Zuber and Itzykson on n-spin correlations in the Ising model. A special case proves that two same-color monomers interact the way physicists predicted.