Polynuclear growth and the Toda lattice

Abstract

It is shown that the polynuclear growth model is a completely integrable Markov process in the sense that its transition probabilities are given by Fredholm determinants of kernels produced by a scattering transform based on the invariant measures modulo the absolute height, continuous time simple random walks. From the linear evolution of the kernels, it is shown that the $n$-point distributions are determinants of $n\times n$ matrices evolving according to the two-dimensional non-Abelian Toda lattice.