A second moment bound for critical points of planar Gaussian fields in shrinking height windows

Abstract

We consider the number of critical points of a stationary planar Gaussian field, restricted to a large domain, whose heights lie in a certain interval. Asymptotics for the mean of this quantity are simple to establish via the Kac–Rice formula, and recently Estrade and Fournier proved a second moment bound that is optimal in the case that the height interval does not depend on the size of the domain. We establish an improved bound in the more delicate case of height windows that are shrinking with the size of the domain.