Fractal geometry of the space-time difference profile in the directed landscape via construction of geodesic local times

Abstract: The Directed Landscape, a random directed metric on the plane (where the first and the second coordinates are termed spatial and temporal respectively), was constructed in the breakthrough work of Dauvergne, Ortmann, and Vir\'ag, and has since been shown to be the scaling limit of various integrable models of Last Passage percolation, a central member of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class. It exhibits several scale invariance properties making it a natural source of rich fractal behavior. Such a study was initiated in Basu-Ganguly-Hammond, where the difference profile i.e., the difference of passage times from two fixed points (say $(\pm 1,0)$), was considered. Owing to geodesic geometry, it turns out that this difference process is almost surely locally constant. The set of non-constancy is connected to disjointness of geodesics and inherits remarkable fractal properties. In particular, it has been established that when only the spatial coordinate is varied, the set of non-constancy of the difference profile has Hausdorff dimension $1/2$, and bears a rather strong resemblance to the zero set of Brownian motion. The arguments crucially rely on a monotonicity property, which is absent when the temporal structure of the process is probed, necessitating the development of new methods. In this paper, we put forth several new ideas, and show that the set of non-constancy of the 2D difference profile and the 1D temporal process (when the spatial coordinate is fixed and the temporal coordinate is varied) have Hausdorff dimensions $5/3$ and $2/3$ respectively. A particularly crucial ingredient in our analysis is the novel construction of a local time process for the geodesic akin to Brownian local time, supported on the "zero set" of the geodesic. Further, we show that the latter has Hausdorff dimension $1/3$ in contrast to the zero set of Brownian motion which has dimension $1/2.$