We study the sequence alignment problem and its independent version, the discrete Hammersley process with an exploration penalty. We obtain rigorous upper bounds for the number of optimality regions in both models near the soft edge. At zero penalty the independent model becomes an exactly solvable model and we identify cases for which the law of the last passage time converges to a Tracy-Widom law.
We prove a large deviation principle and give an expression for the rate function, for the last passage time in a Bernoulli environment. The model is exactly solvable and its invariant version satisfies a Burke-type property. Finally, we compute explicit limiting logarithmic moment generating functions for both the classical and the invariant models. The shape function of this model exhibits a flat edge in certain directions, and we also discuss the rate function and limiting log-moment generating functions in those directions.
These lecture notes are written as reference material for the Advanced Course Hydrodynamical Methods in Last Passage Percolation Models, given at the 28th Coloquio Brasileiro de Matematica at IMPA, Rio de Janeiro, July 2011.
In this paper we prove a duality relation between coalescence times and exit points in last-passage percolation models with exponential weights. As a consequence, we get lower bounds for coalescence times with scaling exponent 3/2, and we relate its distribution with variational problems involving the Brownian motion process and the Airy process.
In this paper we consider an equilibrium last-passage percolation model on an environment given by a compound two-dimensional Poisson process. We prove an $LL^2$-formula relating the initial measure with the last-passage percolation time. This formula turns out to be a useful tool to analyze the fluctuations of the last-passage times along non-characteristic directions.
In this paper we study stationary last passage percolation (LPP) in half-space geometry. We determine the limiting distribution of the last passage time in a critical window close to the origin. The result is a new two-parameter family of distributions: one parameter for the strength of the diagonal bounding the half-space (strength of the source at the origin in the equivalent TASEP language) and the other for the distance of the point of observation from the origin. It should be compared with the one-parameter family giving the Baik--Rains distributions for full-space geometry. We finally show that far enough away from the characteristic line, our distributions indeed converge to the Baik--Rains family. We derive our results using a related integrable model having Pfaffian structure together with careful analytic continuation and steepest descent analysis.