Arctic Circle — Aztec Diamond Domino Tiling


North (frozen)
South (frozen)
East (frozen)
West (frozen)
Temperate (random)
The Arctic Circle Theorem (Jockusch, Propp & Shor 1998): a uniformly random domino tiling of the order-n Aztec diamond has a sharp phase boundary. Outside an inscribed circle of radius n/√2, the tiling is deterministically "frozen" into one of four orientations. Inside — the temperate zone — tiles are disordered. The boundary converges to an exact circle as n→∞. This remarkable phase separation emerges purely from combinatorial randomness.