On the Convergence of FK–Ising Percolation to $$\mathrm {SLE}(16/3, (16/3)-6)$$

Abstract

We give a simplified and complete proof of the convergence of the chordal exploration process in critical FK–Ising percolation to chordal $$\mathrm {SLE}_\kappa ( \kappa -6)$$ with $$\kappa =16/3$$. Our proof follows the classical excursion construction of $$\mathrm {SLE}_\kappa (\kappa -6)$$ processes in the continuum, and we are thus led to introduce suitable cut-off stopping times in order to analyse the behaviour of the driving function of the discrete system when Dobrushin boundary condition collapses to a single point. Our proof is very different from that of Kemppainen and Smirnov (Conformal invariance of boundary touching loops of FK–Ising model. arXiv:1509.08858, 2015; Conformal invariance in random cluster models. II. Full scaling limit as a branching SLE. arXiv:1609.08527, 2016) as it only relies on the convergence to the chordal $$\mathrm {SLE}_{\kappa }$$ process in Dobrushin boundary condition and does not require the introduction of a new observable. Still, it relies crucially on several ingredients: One important emphasis of this paper is to carefully write down some properties which are often considered folklore in the literature but which are only justified so far by hand-waving arguments. The main examples of these are: We end the paper with a detailed sketch of the convergence to radial $$\mathrm {SLE}_\kappa ( \kappa -6)$$ when $$\kappa =16/3$$ as well as the derivation of Onsager’s one-arm exponent 1 / 8.