The stationary horizon and semi-infinite geodesics in the directed landscape

Abstract

The stationary horizon (SH) is a stochastic process of coupled Brownian motions indexed by their real-valued drifts. It was first introduced by the first author as the diffusive scaling limit of the Busemann process of exponential last-passage percolation. It was independently discovered as the Busemann process of Brownian last-passage percolation by the second and third authors. We show that SH is the unique invariant distribution and an attractor of the KPZ fixed point under conditions on the asymptotic spatial slopes. It follows that SH describes the Busemann process of the directed landscape. This gives control of semi-infinite geodesics simultaneously across all initial points and directions. The countable dense set $Ξ$ of directions of discontinuity of the Busemann process is the set of directions in which not all geodesics coalesce and in which there exist at least two distinct geodesics from each initial point. This creates two distinct families of coalescing geodesics in each $Ξ$ direction. In $Ξ$ directions, the Busemann difference profile is distributed like Brownian local time. We describe the point process of directions $ξ\inΞ$ and spatial locations where the $ξ\pm$ Busemann functions separate.