Exponential and double exponential tails for maximum of two-dimensional discrete Gaussian free field

Abstract: We study the tail behavior for the maximum of discrete Gaussian free field on a 2D box with Dirichlet boundary condition after centering by its expectation. We show that it exhibits an exponential decay for the right tail and a double exponential decay for the left tail. In particular, our result implies that the variance of the maximum is of order 1, improving an $o(\log n)$ bound by Chatterjee (2008) and confirming a folklore conjecture. An important ingredient for our proof is a result of Bramson and Zeitouni (2010), who proved the tightness of the centered maximum together with an evaluation of the expectation up to an additive constant.