Mixing times for Glauber dynamics of lozenge tilings of the hexagon

Abstract

We prove that the continuous-time, single-flip Glauber dynamics for lozenge tilings of the size-$N$ hexagon mix in time $N^{2+o(1)}$. This was predicted to hold on fairly general domains of diameter $N$ (on the basis of the ``Lifshitz law'' heuristic) but had previously only been established in domains such that the associated limit shape has no frozen facets. To access the hexagon, we introduce a multi-scale comparison argument between the height function of the random tiling evolving under the Glauber dynamics and the limit shape of a volume-tilted tiling (whose tilting parameter varies suitably in time).