Self-avoiding walks and polygons confined to a square

Abstract

We prove several rigorous results about the asymptotic behaviour of the numbers of polygons and self-avoiding walks confined to a square on the square lattice. Specifically we prove that the dominant asymptotic behaviour of polygons confined to an LxL square is identical to that of self-avoiding walks that cross an LxL square from one corner vertex to the opposite corner vertex. We also prove a result about the subdominant asymptotic behaviour of self-avoiding walks crossing a square and extend this result to polygons confined to a square. In addition, we investigate the problems of self-avoiding walks and polygons in a hypercube in the d-dimensional hypercubic lattice.