Large-scale universal behaviour of Random Interfaces and Stochastic Operators

Stochastic growth phenomena naturally emerge in a variety of physical and biological contexts, such as growth of combustion fronts or bacterial colonies, crystal growth on thin films, turbulent liquid crystals, etc. Even though all these phenomena might appear very diverse at a microscopic scale, they often have the same large-scale behaviour and are therefore said to belong to the same Universality Class. This in particular means that an in-depth analysis of those processes describing these large-scale behaviours is bound to give very accurate quantitative and qualitative predictions about the wide variety of extremely complicated real-world systems in the same class.

Over the last 40 years, the Mathematics and Physics communities in a joint effort determined what were widely believed to be the only two universal processes presumed to capture the large-scale behaviour of random interfaces in one spatial-dimension, namely the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang and Edrwards-Wilkinson Fixed Points, and studied their Universality Classes. In a recent work, I established the existence of a third, new universality class, entirely missed by researchers, and rigorously constructed the universal process at its core, the Brownian Castle. The introduction of this novel class opens a number of new stimulating pathways and a host of exciting questions that this proposal aims at investigating and answering.

The second pillar of this research programme focuses on two-dimensional random surfaces, which are particularly relevant from a physical viewpoint as they correspond to the growth of two-dimensional surfaces in a three-dimensional space. Despite their importance, two-dimensional growth phenomena are by far the most challenging and the least understood. Very little is known concerning their universal large-scale properties and the even harder quest for fluctuations has barely been explored. The present proposal's goal is to develop powerful and robust tools to rigorously address these questions and consequently lay the foundations for a systematic study of these systems and their features.

The last theme of this research plan concerns the Anderson Hamiltonian, also known as random Schrödinger operator. The interest in such an operator is motivated by its ramified connections to a variety of different areas in Mathematics and Physics both from a theoretical and a more applied perspective. Indeed, the spectral properties of the Anderson Hamiltonian are related to the solution theory of (random) Schrödinger's equations or properties of the parabolic Anderson model, random motion in random media or branching processes in random environment. The Anderson Hamiltonian has attracted the attention of a wide number of researchers, driven by the ambition of fully understanding its universal features and the celebrated phenomenon Anderson localisation. This proposal will establish new breakthroughs and tackle long-standing conjectures in the field by complementing the existing literature with novel techniques.