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DGFF 2 – Boundary conditions and Gibbs-Markov property

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In the previous post, we defined the Discrete Gaussian Free Field, and offered some motivation via the discrete random walk bridge. In particular, when the increments of the random walk are chosen to be Gaussian, many natural calculations are straightforward, since Gaussian processes are well-behaved under conditioning and under linear transformations.

Non-zero boundary conditions

In the definition of the DGFF given last time, we demanded that h\equiv 0 on \partial D. But the model is perfectly well-defined under more general boundary conditions.

It’s helpful to recall again the situation with random walk and Brownian bridge. If we want a Brownian motion which passes through (0,0) and (1,s), we could repeat one construction for Brownian bridge, by taking a standard Brownian motion and conditioning (modulo probability zero technicalities) on passing through level s at time 1. But alternatively, we could set

B^{\mathrm{drift-br}}(t) = B(t)+ t(s-B(1)),\quad t\in[0,1],

or equivalently

B^{\mathrm{drift-br}}(t)=B^{\mathrm{br}}(t)+ st, \quad t\in[0,1].

That is, a Brownian bridge with drift can be obtain from a centered Brownian bridge by a linear transformation, and so certainly remains a Gaussian process. And exactly the same holds for a discrete Gaussian bridge: if we want non-zero values at the endpoints, we can obtain this distribution by taking the standard centred bridge and applying a linear transformation.

We can see how this works directly at the level of density functions. If we take 0=Z_0,Z_1,\ldots,Z_{N-1},Z_N=0 a centred Gaussian bridge, then the density of Z=\mathbf{z}\in \mathbb{R}^{N+1} is proportional to

\mathbf{1}\{z_0=z_N=0\}\exp\left( -\frac12 \sum_{i=1}^N (z_i-z_{i-1})^2 \right). (3)

So rewriting z_i= y_i- ki (where we might want k=s/N to fit the previous example), the sum within the exponent rearranges as

-\frac12 \sum_{i=1}^N (y_i-y_{i-1} - k)^2 = -\frac12 \sum_{i=1}^N (y_i-y_{i-1})^2 - 2k(y_N-y_0)+ Nk^2.

So when the values at the endpoints z_0,z_n,y_0,y_N are fixed, this middle term is a constant, as is the final term, and thus the density of the linearly transformed bridge has exactly the same form as the original one.

In two or more dimensions, the analogue of adding a linear function is to add a harmonic function. First, some notation. Let \varphi be any function on \partial D. Then there is a unique harmonic extension of \varphi, for which \nabla \varphi=0 everywhere on D, the interior of the domain. Recall that \nabla is the discrete graph Laplacian defined up to a constant by

(\nabla \varphi) _x = \sum\limits_{x\sim y} \varphi_x - \varphi_y.

If we want h^D instead to have boundary values \varphi, it’s enough to replace h^D with h^D+\varphi. Then, in the density for the DGFF ( (1) in the previous post), the term in the exponential becomes (ignoring the \frac{1}{4d} )

-\sum\limits_{x\sim y} \left[ (h^D_x-h^D_y)^2 + (\varphi_x-\varphi_y)^2 +2(h^D_x - h^D_y)(\varphi_x-\varphi_y)\right].

For each x\in D, on taking this sum over its neighbours y\in \bar D, the final term vanishes (since \varphi is harmonic), while the second term is just a constant. So the density of the transformed field, which we’ll call h^{D,\varphi} is proportional to (after removing the constant arising from the second term above)

\mathbf{1}\left\{h^{D,\varphi}_x = \varphi_x,\, x\in\partial D\right\} \exp\left( -\frac{1}{4d} \sum\limits_{x\sim y} \left( h^{D,\varphi}_x - h^{D,\varphi}_y \right)^2 \right).

So h^{D,\varphi}:= h^D + \varphi satisfies the conditions for the DGFF on D with non-zero boundary conditions \varphi.

Harmonic functions and RW – a quick review

Like the covariances in DGFF, harmonic functions on D are related to simple random walk on D stopped on \partial D. (I’m not claiming a direct connection right now.) We can define the harmonic extension \varphi to an interior point x by taking \mathbb{P}_x to be the law of SRW x=Z_0,Z_1,Z_2,\ldots started from x, and then setting

\varphi(x):= \mathbb{E}\left[ \varphi_{\tau_{\partial d}} \right],

where \tau_{\partial D} is the first time that the random walk hits the boundary.

Inverse temperature – a quick remark

In the original definition of the density of the DGFF, there is the option to add a constant \beta>0 within the exponential term so the density is proportional to

\exp\left(-\beta \sum\limits_{x\sim y} (h_x-h_y)^2 \right).

With zero boundary conditions, the effect of this is straightforward, as varying \beta just rescales the values taken by the field. But with non-zero boundary conditions, the effect is instead to vary the magnitude of the fluctuations of the values of the field around the (unique) harmonic function on the domain with those BCs. In particular, when \beta\rightarrow \infty, the field is ‘reluctant to be far from harmonic’, and so h^D \Rightarrow \varphi.

This parameter \beta is called inverse temperature. So low temperature corresponds to high \beta, and high stability, which fits some physical intuition.

A Markov property

For a discrete (Gaussian) random walk, the Markov property says that conditional on a given value at a given time, the trajectory of the process before this time is independent of the trajectory afterwards. The discrete Gaussian bridge is similar. Suppose we have as before 0=Z_0,Z_1,\ldots, Z_N=0 a centred Gaussian bridge, and condition that Z_k=y, for k\in\{1,\ldots,N-1\}, and y\in\mathbb{R}. With this conditioning, the density (3) splits as a product

\mathbf{1}\{z_0=z_N=0, z_k=y\}\exp\left(-\frac12 \sum\limits_{i=1}^N (z_i-z_{i-1})^2 \right) =

\mathbf{1}\{z_0=0,z_k=y\} \exp\left(-\frac12 \sum\limits_{i=1}^k (z_i-z_{i-1})^2 \right) \cdot \mathbf{1}\{z_k=y,z_N=0\} \exp\left(-\frac12 \sum\limits_{i=k+1}^N (z_i-z_{i-1})^2 \right).

Therefore, with this conditioning, the discrete Gaussian bridge splits into a pair of independent discrete Gaussian bridges with drift. (The same would hold if the original process had drift too.)

The situation for the DGFF is similar, though rather than focusing on the condition, it makes sense to start by focusing on the sub-domain of interest. Let A\subset D, and take B=\bar D\backslash A. So in particular \partial A\subset B.

img_20161106_194123472_compressedThen we have that conditional on h^D\big|_{\partial A}, the restricted fields h^D\big|_{B\backslash \partial A} and h^D\big|_A are independent. Furthermore, h^D\big|_A has the distribution of the DGFF on A, with boundary condition given by h^D\big|_{\partial A}. As in the discrete bridge, this follows just by splitting the density. Every gradient term corresponds to an edge in the underlying graph that lies either entirely inside \bar A or entirely inside B. This holds for a general class of Gibbs models where the Hamiltonian depends only on the sum of some function of the heights (taken to be constant in this ‘free’ model) and the sum of some function of their nearest-neighbour gradients.

One additional and useful interpretation is that if we only care about the field on the restricted region A, the dependence of h^D\big|_A on h^D\big|_{D\backslash A} comes only through h^D\big|_{\partial A}. But more than that, it comes only through the (random) harmonic function which extends the (random) values taken on the boundary of A to the whole of A. So, if h^A is an independent DGFF on A with zero boundary conditions, we can construct the DGFF h^D from its value on D\backslash A via

h^D_x \stackrel{d}= h^A_x + \varphi^{h^D\big|_{\partial A}},

where \varphi^{h^D\big|_{\partial A}} is the unique harmonic extension of the (random) values taken by h^D on \partial A to \bar A.

This Markov property is crucial to much of the analysis to come. There are several choices of the restricted domain which come up repeatedly. In the next post we’ll look at how much one can deduce by taking A to be the even vertices in D (recalling that every integer lattice \mathbb{Z}^d is bipartite), and then taking A to be a finer sublattice within D. We’ll use this to get some good bounds on the probability that the DGFF is positive on the whole of D. Perhaps later we’ll look at a ring decomposition of \mathbb{Z}^d consisting of annuli spreading out from a fixed origin. Then the distribution of the field at this origin can be considered, via the final idea discussed above, as the limit of an infinite sequence of random harmonic functions given by the values taken by the field at increasingly large radius from the origin. Defining the DGFF on the whole lattice depends on the existence or otherwise of this local limit.

Sticky Brownian Motion

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This follows on pretty much directly from the previous post about reflected Brownian motion. Recall that this is a process defined on the non-negative reals which looks like Brownian motion away from 0. We consider whether RBM is the only such process, and how any alternative might be constructed as a limit of discrete-time Markov processes.

One of the alternatives is called Sticky Brownian motion. This process spends more time at 0 than reflected Brownian motion. In fact it spends some positive proportion of time at 0. My main aim here is to explain why some intuitive ideas I had about how this might arise are wrong.

The first thought was to ensure that each visit to 0 last some positive measure of time. This could be achieved by staying at 0 for an Exp(1) duration, every time the process visited it. It doesn’t seem unreasonable that this might appear as the limit of a standard SRW adjusted so that on each visit to 0 the walker waits for a time given by independent geometric distributions. These distributions are memoryless, so that is fine, but by Blumenthal’s 0-1 Law, starting from 0 a Brownian motion hits zero infinitely many times before any small time t. So in fact the process described above would be identically zero as before it gets anywhere it would have to spend some amount of time at 0 given by an infinite sum of Exp(1) RVs.

We will return later to the question of why the proposed discrete-time model will still converge to reflected BM rather than anything more exotic. First though, we should discount the possibility of any intermediate level of stickiness, where the set of times spent at 0 still has measure zero, but the local time at 0 grows faster than for standard reflected BM. We can define the local time at 0 through a limit

L_t=\lim_{\epsilon\downarrow 0}\frac{1}{2\epsilon}\text{Leb}(\{0\le s \le t: |B_t|<\epsilon\})

of the measure of time spent very near 0, rescaled appropriately. So if the measure of the times when the process is at 0 is zero, then the local time is determined by behaviour near zero rather than by behaviour at zero. More precisely, on the interval [-\epsilon,\epsilon], the process behaves like Brownian motion, except on a set of measure zero, so the local time process should look the same as that of BM itself. Note I don’t claim this as a formal proof, but I hope it is a helpful heuristic for why you can’t alter the local time process without altering the whole process.

At this stage, it seems sensible to define Sticky Brownian motion. For motivation, note that we are looking for a process which spends a positive measure of time at 0. So let’s track this as a process, say C_t. Then the set of times when C is increasing is sparse, as it coincides with the process being 0, but we know we cannot wait around at 0 for some interval of time without losing the Markov property. So C shares properties with the local time of a reflected BM. The only difference is that the measure of times when C is increasing is positive here, but zero for the local time.

So it makes sense to construct the extra time spent at zero from the local time of a standard reflected BM. The heuristic is that we slow down the process whenever it is at 0, so that local time becomes real time. We can also control the factor by which this slowing-down happens, so define

\sigma(s)=\rho L(s)+s,

where L is the local time process of an underlying reflected BM, and \rho>0 is a constant. So \sigma is a map giving a random time-change. Unsurprisingly, we now define Sticky BM as the reflected BM with respect to this time-change. To do this formally, it is easiest to define a family of stopping times \{\tau_t\}, such that \sigma(\tau_t)=t, \tau_{\sigma(s)}=s, then if X is the reflected BM, define Y_t=X_{\tau_t} for the sticky BM.

It is worth thinking about what the generator of this process should be. In particular, why should it be different to reflected BM? The key observation is that the drift of the underlying reflected BM is essentially infinite at 0. By slowing down the process at 0, this drift becomes finite. So the martingale associated with sticky BM is precisely a time-changed version of the martingale associated with the underlying reflected BM, but this time-change is precisely what is required to give a generator. We get:

(\mathcal{L}f)(x)=\begin{cases}\frac12f''(x)&\quad x>0\\ \rho^{-1}f'(0) &\quad x=0.\end{cases}

Now that we have the generator, it starts to become apparent how sticky BM might appear as a limit of discrete-time walks. The process must look like mean-zero, unit-variance RW everywhere except near 0, where the limiting drift should be \rho^{-1}. Note that when considering the limiting drift near zero, we are taking a joint limit in x and h. The order of this matters. As explained at the end of the previous article, we only need to worry about the limiting drift along sequences of x,h such that a_h(x)\rightarrow 0. If no such sequences exist, or the limiting drift along any of these is infinite, then we actually have a reflected boundary condition.

This highlights one confusing matter about convergence of reflected processes. The boundary of the discrete-time process should converge to the boundary of the reflected process, but we also have to consider where reflective behaviour happens. Can we get sticky BM with reflection only at the boundary in the discrete-time processes? The answer turns out to be no. At the start of this article, I proposed a model of SRW with geometric waiting times whenever the origin was visiting. What is the limit of this?

The trick is to consider how long the discrete process spends near 0, after rescaling. It will spend a multiple 1/p more time at 0 itself, where p is the parameter of the geometric distribution, but no more time than expected at any point x\in(0,\epsilon). But time spent in (0,\epsilon) dominates time spent at 0 before this adjustment, so must also dominate it after the adjustment, so in the limit, the proportion of time spent at 0 is unchanged, and so in particular it cannot be positive.

Because of all of this, in practice it seems that most random walks we might be interested in converge (if they converge to a process at all) to a reflected SDE/diffusion etc, rather than one with sticky boundary conditions. I feel I’ve been talking a lot about Markov processes converging, so perhaps next, or at least soon, I’ll write some more technical things about exactly what conditions and methods are required to prove this.

REFERENCES

S. Varadhan – Chapter 16 from a Lecture Course at NYU can be found here.

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