Grid entropy in last passage percolation — A superadditive critical exponent approach

Working in the setting of i.i.d. last-passage percolation on RD with no assumptions on the underlying edge-weight distribution, we arrive at the notion of grid entropy — a Subadditive Ergodic Theorem limit of the entropies of paths with empirical measures weakly converging to a given target, or equivalently a deterministic critical exponent of canonical order statistics associated with the Levy-Prokhorov metric. This provides a fresh approach to an entropy first developed by Rassoul-Agha and Seppäläinen as a large deviation rate function of empirical measures along paths. In their 2014 paper, variational formulas are developed for the point-to-point/point-to-level Gibbs Free Energies as the convex conjugates of this entropy. We rework these formulas in our new framework and explicitly link our descriptions of grid entropy to theirs. We also improve on a known bound for this entropy by introducing a relative entropy term in the inequality. Furthermore, we show that the set of measures with finite grid entropy coincides with the deterministic set of limit points of empirical measures studied in a 2020 paper by Bates. We partially answer a directed polymer version of a question of Hoffman which was previously tackled in the zero temperature case by Bates.