Vicious random walkers and a discretization of Gaussian random matrix ensembles

Abstract

The vicious random walker problem on a one-dimensional lattice is considered. Many walkers take simultaneous steps on the lattice and the configurations in which two of them arrive at the same site are prohibited. It is known that the probability distribution of N walkers after M steps can be written in a determinant form. Using an integration technique borrowed from the theory of random matrices, we show that arbitrary kth order correlation functions of the walkers can be expressed as quaternion determinants whose elements are compactly expressed in terms of symmetric Hahn polynomials.