Asymptotics of Symmetric Polynomials: A Dynamical Point of View

Abstract In this paper we study the asymptotic behavior of the (skew) Macdonald and Jack symmetric polynomials as the number of variables grows to infinity. We characterize their limits in terms of certain variational problems. As an intermediate step, we establish a large deviation principle for the $$\theta $$ θ analogue of non-intersecting Bernoulli random walks. When $$\theta =1$$ θ = 1 , these walks are equivalent to random Lozenges tilings of strip domains, where the variational principle (with general domains and boundary conditions) has been proven in the seminal work by Cohn et al. (J Am Math Soc 14(2):297–346, 2001). Our result gives a new argument of this variational principle, and also extends it to non-intersecting $$\theta $$ θ -Bernoulli random walks for any $$\theta \in (0,\infty )$$ θ ∈ ( 0 , ∞ ) . Remarkably, the rate functions remain identical, differing only by a factor of $$1/\theta $$ 1 / θ .