We consider planar directed last-passage percolation on the square lattice with general i.i.d. weights and study the geometry of the full set of semi-infinite geodesics in a typical realization of the random environment. The structure of the geodesics is studied through the properties of the Busemann functions viewed as a stochastic process indexed by the asymptotic direction. Our results are further connected to the ergodic program for and stability properties of random Hamilton-Jacobi equations. In the exactly solvable exponential model, our results specialize to give the first complete characterization of the uniqueness and coalescence structure of the entire family of semi-infinite geodesics for any model of this type. Furthermore, we compute statistics of locations of instability, where we discover an unexpected connection to simple symmetric random walk.
In exponential last passage percolation, we consider the rescaled Busemann process $x\mapsto N^{-1/3}B^ρ_{0,[xN^{2/3}]e_1} \,\, (x\in\mathbb{R})$, as a process parametrized by the scaled density $ρ=1/2+\fracμ{4} N^{-1/3}$, and taking values in $C(\mathbb{R})$. We show that these processes, as $N\rightarrow \infty$, have a càdlàg scaling limit $G=(G_μ)_{μ\in \mathbb{R}}$, parametrized by $μ$ and taking values in $C(\mathbb{R})$. The limiting process $G$, which can be thought of as the Busemann process under the KPZ scaling, can be described as an ensemble of "sticky" lines of Brownian regularit…
In this survey article we consider the directed last-passage percolation model on the planar square lattice with nearest-neighbor steps and general i.i.d. weights on the vertices, outside of the class of exactly solvable models. We show how stationary cocycles are constructed from queueing fixed points and how these cocycles characterize the limit shape, yield existence of Busemann functions in directions where the shape has some regularity, describe the direction of the competition interface, and answer questions on existence, uniqueness, and coalescence of directional semi-infinite geodesics…
We prove the existence of semi-infinite geodesics for Brownian last-passage percolation (BLPP). Specifically, on a single event of probability one, there exist semi-infinite geodesics started from every space-time point and traveling in every asymptotic direction. Properties of these geodesics include uniqueness for a fixed initial point and direction, non-uniqueness for fixed direction but random initial points, and coalescence of all geodesics traveling in a common, fixed direction. Along the way, we prove that for fixed northeast and southwest directions, there almost surely exist no bi-inf…
We study the directed last-passage percolation model on the planar square lattice with nearest-neighbor steps and general i.i.d. weights on the vertices, outside of the class of exactly solvable models. Stationary cocycles are constructed for this percolation model from queueing fixed points. These cocycles serve as boundary conditions for stationary last-passage percolation, solve variational formulas that characterize limit shapes, and yield existence of Busemann functions in directions where the shape has some regularity. In a sequel to this paper the cocycles will be used to prove results …
We study first-passage percolation on Z2, where the edge weights are given by a translation-ergodic distribution, addressing questions related to existence and coalescence of infinite geodesics. Some of these were studied in the late 90's by C. Newman and collaborators under strong assumptions on the limiting shape and weight distribution. In this paper we develop a framework for working with distributional limits of Busemann functions and use it to prove forms of Newman's results under minimal assumptions. For instance, we show a form of coalescence of long finite geodesics in any determinist…
Permutation invariance in last-passage percolation and the distribution of the Busemann process
North Carolina State University(北卡罗来纳州立大学);University College Dublin(都柏林大学学院);University of Oxford(牛津大学);University of Wisconsin–Madison(威斯康星大学麦迪逊分校);Columbia University(哥伦比亚大学)
We show existence, uniqueness, and directedness properties for infinite geodesics in the FPP model. After giving the fundamental definitions, we describe results by Newman and collaborators giving existence and uniqueness of directed geodesics under an unproven curvature assumption. We then give two proofs of the existence of at least two infinite geodesics under no unproven assumptions. In the final two sections, we give proofs of directedness statements for infinite geodesics using more recent methods which give information even under no unproven assumptions and prove a generalized uniquenes…
We consider i.i.d. last-passage percolation on $\mathbb{Z}^2$ with weights having distribution $F$ and time-constant $g_F$. We provide an explicit condition on the large deviation rate function for independent sums of $F$ that determines when some adjacent Busemann function increments are negatively correlated. As an example, we prove that $\operatorname{Bernoulli}(p)$ weights for $p > p^* \approx 0.6504$ satisfy this condition. We prove this condition by establishing a direct relationship between the negative correlations of adjacent Busemann increments and the dominance of the time-constant …
The interplay between two-dimensional percolation growth models and one-dimensional particle processes has been a fruitful source of interesting mathematical phenomena. In this paper we develop a connection between the construction of Busemann functions in the Hammersley last-passage percolation model with i.i.d. random weights, and the existence, ergodicity and uniqueness of equilibrium (or time-invariant) measures for the related (multi-class) interacting fluid system. As we shall see, in the classical Hammersley model, where each point has weight one, this approach brings a new and rather g…
We prove that given any fixed asymptotic velocity, the finite length O'Connell-Yor polymer has an infinite length limit satisfying the law of large numbers with this velocity. By a Markovian property of the quenched polymer this reduces to showing the existence of Busemann functions: almost sure limits of ratios of random point-to-point partition functions. The key ingredients are the Burke property of the O'Connell-Yor polymer and a comparison lemma for the ratios of partition functions. We also show the existence of infinite length limits in the Brownian last passage percolation model.
A competition model on $\mathbb{Z}_+^{2}$ governed by directed last passage percolation is considered. A stochastic domination argument between subtrees of the last passage percolation is put forward.
In this paper we will show how the results found in Cator and Pimentel 2009, about the Busemann functions in last-passage percolation, can be used to calculate the asymptotic distribution of the speed of a single second class particle starting from an arbitrary deterministic configuration which has a rarefaction fan, in either the totally asymetric exclusion process, or the Hammersley interacting particle process. The method will be to use the well known last-passage percolation description of the exclusion process and of the Hammersley process, and then the well known connection between secon…
We pursue the study of a random coloring first passage percolation model introduced by Fontes and Newman. We prove that the asymptotic shape of this first passage percolation model continuously depends on the law of the coloring. The proof uses several couplings, particularly with greedy lattice animals.
This paper is a survey of various results and techniques in first passage percolation, a random process modeling a spreading fluid on an infinite graph. The latter half of the paper focuses on the connection between first passage percolation and a certain class of stochastic growth and competition models.
We give the first properties of independent Bernoulli percolation, for oriented graphs on the set of vertices $\Z^d$ that are translation-invariant and may contain loops. We exhibit some examples showing that the critical probability for the existence of an infinite cluster may be direction-dependent. Then, we prove that the phase transition in a given direction is sharp, and study the links between percolation and first-passage percolation on these oriented graphs.
We consider the model of i.i.d. first passage percolation on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ : we associate with each edge $e$ of the graph a passage time $t(e)$ taking values in $[0,+\infty]$, such that $\mathbb{P}[t(e)<+\infty] >p_c(d)$. Equivalently, we consider a standard (finite) i.i.d. first passage percolation model on a super-critical Bernoulli percolation performed independently. We prove a weak shape theorem without any moment assumption. We also prove that the corresponding time constant is positive if and only if $\mathbb{P}[t(e)=0]<p_c(d)$.
We consider standard first-passage percolation on $\Z^d$. Let $e_1$ be the first coordinate vector. Let $a(n)$ be the expected passage time from the origin to $ne_1$. In this short paper, we note that $a(n)$ is increasing under some strong condition on the support of the law of the passage times on the edges.
We determine the asymptotic speed of the first-passage percolation process on some ladder-like graphs (or width-2 stretches) when the times associated with different edges are independent and exponentially distributed but not necessarily all with the same mean. The method uses a particular Markov chain associated with the first-passage percolation process and properties of its stationary distribution.
A range of first-passage percolation type models are believed to demonstrate the related properties of sublinear variance and superdiffusivity. We show that directed last-passage percolation with Gaussian vertex weights has a sublinear variance property. We also consider other vertex weight distributions. Corresponding results are obtained for the ground state of the `directed polymers in a random environment' model.
Percolation with edge-passage probability p and first-passage percolation are studied for the n-cube B_n ={0,1}^n with nearest neighbor edges. For oriented and unoriented percolation, p=e/n and p=1/n are the respective critical probabilities. For oriented first-passage percolation with i.i.d. edge-passage times having a density of 1 near the origin, the percolation time (time to reach the opposite corner of the cube) converges in probability to 1 as n->infty. This resolves a conjecture of David Aldous. When the edge-passage distribution is standard exponential, the (smaller) percolation time f…
We show that the number of maximal paths in directed last-passage percolation on the hypercubic lattice ${\mathbb Z}^d$ $(d\geq2)$ in which weights take finitely many values is typically exponentially large.
The non-random fluctuation is one of the central objects in first passage percolation. It was proved in [Shuta Nakajima. Divergence of non-random fluctuation in First Passage Percolation. {\em Electron. Commun. Probab.} 24 (65), 1-13. 2019.] that for a particular asymptotic direction, it diverges in a lattice first passage percolation with an explicit lower bound. In this paper, we discuss the non-random fluctuation in Euclidean first passage percolations and show that it diverges in dimension $d\geq 2$ in this model also. Compared with the result in \cite{N19}, the present result is proved fo…
We consider a wide class of ergodic first passage percolation processes on Z^2 and prove that there exist at least four one-sided geodesics a.s. We also show that coexistence is possible with positive probability in a four color Richardson's growth model. This improves earlier results of Haggstrom and Pemantle, Garet and Marchand, and Hoffman who proved that first passage percolation has at least two geodesics and that coexistence is possible in a two color Richardson's growth model.
We introduce a new first passage percolation model in a Poissonian environment on $\mathbb{R}^{2}$. In this model, the action of a path depends on the geometry of the path and the travel time. We prove that the transversal fluctuation exponent for point-to-line action minimizers is at least $3/5$.
We prove a GUE central limit theorem for random variables with finite fourth moment. We apply this theorem to prove that the directed first and last passage percolation problems in thin rectangles exhibit universal fluctuations given by the Tracy-Widom law.
Last three years have seen new developments in the theory of last passage percolation, which has variety applications to random permutations, random growth and random vicious walks. It turns out that a few class of models have determinant formulas for the probability distribution, which can be analyzed asymptotically. One of the tools for the asymptotic analysis has been the Riemann-Hilbert method. In this paper, we survey the use of Riemann-Hilbert method in the last passage percolation problems.
We consider directed first passage percolation on the integer lattice, with time constant $μ$ and passage time $a_{0n}$ from the origin to $(n,0,...,0)$. It is shown that under certain conditions on the passage time distribution, $Ea_{0n} - nμ= O(n^{1/2}(\log\log n)/\log n)$.
In this paper, we study the maximal edge-traversal time (simply we call maximal weight hereafter) on the optimal paths in the first passage percolation for several edge distributions, including the Pareto and Weibull distributions. It is known to be unbounded when the edge distribution has unbounded support [J. van den Berg and H. Kesten. Inequalities for the time constant in first-passage percolation. Ann. Appl. Probab. 56-80, 1993]. We determine the order of the growth up to a multiplicative constant.
Using the fact that the Airy process describes the limiting fluctuations of the Hammersley last-passage percolation model, we prove that it behaves locally like a Brownian motion. Our method is quite straightforward, and it is based on a certain monotonicity and good control over the equilibrium measures of the Hammersley model (local comparison).
We consider the first passage percolation model on the square lattice with an edge weight distribution F. In this paper, we consider the number of optimal paths for two points separated by a long distance. We show that there is a phase transition in the sub-criticality and the criticality.
We provide a new exponential concentration inequality for First Passage Percolation valid for a wide class of edge times distributions. This improves and extends a result by Benjamini, Kalai and Schramm which gave a variance bound for Bernoulli edge times. Our approach is based on some functional inequalities extending the work of Rossignol and Falik and Samorodnitsky.
We consider the first-passage percolation problem on effectively one-dimensional graphs with vertex set {1,...,n}\times{0,1} and translation-invariant edge-structure. For three of six non-trivial cases we obtain exact expressions for the asymptotic percolation rate χ by solving certain recursive distributional equations and invoking results from ergodic theory to identify χ as the expected asymptotic one-step growth of the first-passage time from (0,0) to (n,0).
The aim of this paper is to generalize the well-known asymptotic shape result for first-passage percolation on $\Zd$ to first-passage percolation on a random environment given by the infinite cluster of a supercritical Bernoulli percolation model. We prove the convergence of the renormalized set of wet points to a deterministic shape that does not depend on the random environment. As a special case of the previous result, we obtain an asymptotic shape theorem for the chemical distance in supercritical Bernoulli percolation. We also prove a flat edge result. Some various examples are also given…
We consider first-passage percolation on the edges of $\mathbb{Z}^2 \times \{1, \cdots, k\},$ namely the slab $\mathbb{S}_k$ of width $k$. Each edge is assigned independently a passage time of either 0 (with probability $p_c(\mathbb{S}_k)$) or 1 ( with probability $1-p_c(\mathbb{S}_k)$) where $p_c$ is the critical probability for Bernouilli percolation. We prove central limit theorems for point-to-point and point-to-line passage times. These generalize the results of Kesten and Zhang \cite{kestenzhang} to non-planar graphs.
In this paper we consider first passage percolation on the square lattice \(\mathbb{Z}^d\) with passage times that are independent and have bounded \(p^{th}\) moment for some \(p > 6(1+d),\) but not necessarily identically distributed. For integer \(n \geq 1,\) let \(T(0,n)\) be the minimum time needed to reach the point \((n,\mathbf{0})\) from the origin. We prove that \(\frac{1}{n}\left(T(0,n) - \mathbb{E}T(0,n)\right)\) converges to zero in \(L^2\) and use a subsequence argument to obtain almost sure convergence. As a corollary, for i.i.d. passage times, we also obtain the usual almost sure…
We generalize Richardson's model by starting with two sites of different colors and giving each new site the color of the site that spawned it. We show that co-existence is possible.
We consider last-passage percolation models in two dimensions, in which the underlying weight distribution has a heavy tail of index alpha<2. We prove scaling laws and asymptotic distributions, both for the passage times and for the shape of optimal paths; these are expressed in terms of a family (indexed by alpha) of "continuous last-passage percolation" models in the unit square. In the extreme case alpha=0 (corresponding to a distribution with slowly varying tail) the asymptotic distribution of the optimal path can be represented by a random self-similar measure on [0,1], whose multifractal…
We consider first-passage percolation on the edges of $\mathbb{Z}^2 \times k,$ namely the slab of width $k$. Each edge is assigned independently a passage time of either 0 (with probability $1-p_c(\mathbb{S}_k)$) or 1 ((with probability $p_c(\mathbb{S}_k)$) where $p_c$ is the critical probability. We prove central limit theorems for point-to-point and point-to-line passage times. These generalize the results of [Kesten and Zhang] to non-planar graphs.
For First Passage Percolation in Z^d with large d, we construct a path connecting the origin to {x_1 =1}, whose passage time has optimal order \log d/d. Besides, an improved lower bound for the "diagonal" speed of the cluster combined with a result by Dhar (1988) shows that the limiting shape in FPP with exponential passage times (and thus that of Eden model) is not the euclidian ball in dimension larger than 35.
In this paper we prove a duality relation between coalescence times and exit points in last-passage percolation models with exponential weights. As a consequence, we get lower bounds for coalescence times with scaling exponent 3/2, and we relate its distribution with variational problems involving the Brownian motion process and the Airy process.
We consider two different objects on super-critical Bernoulli percolation on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ : the time constant for i.i.d. first-passage percolation (for $d\geq 2$) and the isoperimetric constant (for $d=2$). We prove that both objects are continuous with respect to the law of the environment. More precisely we prove that the isoperimetric constant of supercritical percolation in $\mathbb{Z}^2$ is continuous in the percolation parameter. As a corollary we prove that normalized sets achieving the isoperimetric constant are continuous with respect to the Hausdroff metric. Concerning first-passag…
We consider first passage percolation with i.i.d. weights on edges of the d-dimensional cubic lattice. Under the assumptions that a weight is equal to zero with probability smaller than the critical probability of bond percolation in the d-dimensional cubic lattice, and has moments bigger than 1, we investigate upper bounds on the so-called non-random fluctuations of the model. In addition, we give an application of our result to a lower bound for variance of the first passage percolation in the case where the limit shape has flat edges.
In this note we investigate the last passage percolation model in the presence of macroscopic inhomogeneity. We analyze how this affects the scaling limit of the passage time, leading to a variational problem that provides an ODE for the deterministic limiting shape of the maximal path. We obtain a sufficient analytical condition for uniqueness of the solution for the variational problem. Consequences for the totally asymmetric simple exclusion process are discussed.
We study the rate of convergence in the Shape Theorem of first-passage percolation, obtaining the precise asymptotic rate of decay for the probability of linear order deviations under a moment condition. Our results are stated for a given time and complements recent work by the same author, in which the rate of convergence was studied from the standard spatial perspective.
In this paper, we study some properties of optimal paths in the first passage percolation on $\Z^d$ and show the followings: (1) the number of optimal paths has an exponential growth if the distribution has an atom; (2) the means of intersection and union of optimal paths are linear in the distance. For the proofs, we use the configuration--flipping argument introduced in [J. van den Berg and H. Kesten. Inequalities for the time constant in first-passage percolation. Ann. Appl. Probab. 56-80, 1993] with suitable adaptions.
This paper studies the first passage percolation (FPP) model: each edge in the cubic lattice is assigned a random passage time, and consideration is given to the behavior of the percolation region $B(t)$, which consists of those vertices that can be reached from the origin within a time $t > 0$. Cox and Durrett showed the shape theorem for the percolation region, saying that the normalized region $B(t)/t$ converges to some limit shape $\mathcal{B}$. This paper introduces a general FPP model defined on crystal lattices, and shows the monotonicity of the limit shapes under covering maps, thereby…
We consider a last-passage directed percolation model in $Z_+^2$, with i.i.d. weights whose common distribution has a finite $(2+p)$th moment. We study the fluctuations of the passage time from the origin to the point $\big(n,n^{\lfloor a \rfloor}\big)$. We show that, for suitable $a$ (depending on $p$), this quantity, appropriately scaled, converges in distribution as $n\to\infty$ to the Tracy-Widom distribution, irrespective of the underlying weight distribution. The argument uses a coupling to a Brownian directed percolation problem and the strong approximation of Komlós, Major and Tusnády.
In first-passage percolation, one places nonnegative i.i.d. random variables (T (e)) on the edges of Z d. A geodesic is an optimal path for the passage times T (e). Consider a local property of the time environment. We call it a pattern. We investigate the number of times a geodesic crosses a translate of this pattern. Under mild conditions, we show that, apart from an event with exponentially small probability, this number is linear in the distance between the extremities of the geodesic.
The Euclidean first-passage percolation model of Howard and Newman is a rotationally invariant percolation model built on a Poisson point process. It is known that the passage time between 0 and $ne_1$ obeys a diffusive upper bound: $\mbox{Var}\, T(0,ne_1) \leq Cn$, and in this paper we improve this inequality to $Cn/\log n$. The methods follow the strategy used for sublinear variance proofs on the lattice, using the Falik-Samorodnitsky inequality and a Bernoulli encoding, but with substantial technical difficulties. To deal with the different setup of the Euclidean model, we represent the pas…
We consider the standard first passage percolation on $\mathbb{Z}^{d}$: with each edge of the lattice we associate a random capacity. We are interested in the maximal flow through a cylinder in this graph. Under some assumptions Kesten proved in 1987 a law of large numbers for the rescaled flow. Chayes and Chayes established that the large deviations far away below its typical value are of surface order, at least for the Bernoulli percolation and cylinders of certain height. Thanks to another approach we extend here their result to higher cylinders, and we transport this result to the model of…