Interlaced Particle Systems and Tilings of the Aztec Diamond

Abstract

Motivated by the problem of domino tilings of the Aztec diamond, a weighted particle system is defined on N lines, with line j containing j particles. The particles are restricted to lattice points from 0 to N, and particles on successive lines are subject to an interlacing constraint. It is shown that this particle system is exactly solvable, to the extent that not only can the partition function be computed exactly, but so too can the marginal distributions. These results in turn are used to give new derivations within the particle picture of a number of known fundamental properties of the tiling problem, for example that the number of distinct configurations is 2N(N+1)/2, and that there i..