From the Airy line ensemble to the Gaussian free field

Abstract

We study the global fluctuations of the height function associated with the Airy line ensemble. Using its determinantal structure and a steepest-descent analysis of the extended Airy kernel, we prove that, after a suitable rescaling, the centered height function converges to an explicit pullback of the Gaussian free field. The convergence holds in the sense of joint moments of linear statistics against compactly supported continuous test functions.