Chemical Distance for the Level Sets of the Gaussian Free Field

Abstract

We consider the Gaussian free field $\varphi$ on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ for $d \geq 3$ and study the level sets $\{\varphi \geq h \}$ in the percolating regime. We prove upper and lower bounds for the probability that the chemical distance is much larger than Euclidean distance. Our proof uses a renormalization scheme combined with a bootstrap argument.