Height fluctuations in the honeycomb dimer model

Abstract

We study a model of random surfaces arising in the dimer model on the honeycomb lattice. For a fixed ``wire frame'' boundary condition, as the lattice spacing $\epsilon\to0$, Cohn, Kenyon and Propp [CKP] showed the almost sure convergence of a random surface to a non-random limit shape $\Sigma_0$. In [KO], Okounkov and the author showed how to parametrize the limit shapes in terms of analytic functions, in particular constructing a natural conformal structure on them. We show here that when $\Sigma_0$ has no facets, for a family of boundary conditions approximating the wire frame, the large-scale surface fluctuations (height fluctuations) about $\Sigma_0$ converge as $\epsilon\to0$ to a Gaussian free field for the above conformal structure. We also show that the local statistics of the fluctuations near a given point $x$ are, as conjectured in [CKP], given by the unique ergodic Gibbs measure (on plane configurations) whose slope is the slope of the tangent plane of $\Sigma_0$ at $x$.