Duality in the directed landscape and its applications to fractal geometry

TL;DR

This paper explores the fractal structure of geodesic trees in the directed landscape, using duality to analyze atypical points and determine their Hausdorff dimension, advancing understanding of geodesic coalescence in random geometries.

Contribution

It introduces a duality approach to study the fractal properties of geodesic trees in the directed landscape, providing new results on the Hausdorff dimension of atypical point sets.

Findings

Set of points with two semi-infinite geodesics has Hausdorff dimension 4/3

Set of points with three semi-infinite geodesics is countable

Duality simplifies analysis of fractal structures in the landscape

Abstract

Geodesic coalescence, or the tendency of geodesics to merge together, is a hallmark phenomenon observed in a variety of planar random geometries involving a random distortion of the Euclidean metric. As a result of this, the union of interiors of all geodesics going to a fixed point tends to form a tree-like structure which is supported on a vanishing fraction of the space. Such geodesic trees exhibit intricate fractal behaviour; for instance, while almost every point in the space has only one geodesic going to the fixed point, there exist atypical points which admit two such geodesics. In this paper, we consider the directed landscape, the recently constructed scaling limit of exponential last passage percolation (LPP), with the aim of developing tools to analyse the fractal aspects of the tree of semi-infinite geodesics in a given direction. We use the duality (Pimentel '16) between the geodesic tree and the interleaving competition interfaces in exponential LPP to obtain a duality between the geodesic tree and the corresponding dual tree in the landscape. Using this, we show that problems concerning the fractal behaviour of sets of atypical points for the geodesic tree can be transformed into corresponding problems for the dual tree, which might turn out to be easier. In particular, we use this method to show that the set of points admitting two semi-infinite geodesics in a fixed direction a.s. has Hausdorff dimension $4/3$, thereby answering a question posed in Busani-Sepp\"{a}l\"{a}inen-Sorensen '22. We also show that the set of points admitting three semi-infinite geodesics in a fixed direction is a.s. countable.