Convergence of the lace expansion

The lace expansion is a flexible method that has been used since the 1980s to analyse the critical behaviour of high-dimensional random systems, including self-avoiding walk, percolation, and spin systems. It originated in work of Brydges and Spencer on weakly self-avoiding walk in dimensions above 4, and since then several different approaches have been developed to prove convergence of the expansion. I will explain what the lace expansion for self-avoiding walk is, and will then present a new and relatively simple method for proving convergence of the lace expansion for weakly self-avoiding walk. The talk is based on a paper to appear in Ann. Inst. H. Poincare Probab. Statist., available at: link.