Muttalib--Borodin plane partitions and the hard edge of random matrix ensembles

Abstract: We study probabilistic and combinatorial aspects of natural volume-and-trace weighted plane partitions and their continuous analogues. We prove asymptotic limit laws for the largest parts of these ensembles in terms of new and known hard- and soft-edge distributions of random matrix theory. As a corollary we obtain an asymptotic transition between Gumbel and Tracy--Widom GUE fluctuations for the largest part of such plane partitions, with the continuous Bessel kernel providing the interpolation. We interpret our results in terms of two natural models of directed last passage percolation (LPP): a discrete $(\max, +)$ infinite-geometry model with rapidly decaying geometric weights, and a continuous $(\min, \cdot)$ model with power weights.