We study geometric and spectral properties of typical hyperbolic surfaces of high genus, excluding a set of small measure for the Weil-Petersson probability measure. We first prove Benjamini-Schramm convergence to the hyperbolic plane H as the genus g goes to infinity. An estimate for the number of eigenvalues in an interval [a,b] in terms of a, b and g is then proven using the Selberg trace formula. It implies the convergence of spectral measures to the spectral measure of H as g $\rightarrow$+$\infty$, and a uniform Weyl law as b $\rightarrow$+$\infty$. We deduce a bound on the number of small eigenvalues, and the multiplicity of any eigenvalue.
We investigate the asymptotic behavior of eigenfunctions of the Laplacian on Riemannian manifolds. We show that Benjamini-Schramm convergence provides a unified language for the level and eigenvalue aspects of the theory. As a result, we present a mathematically precise formulation of Berry's conjecture for a compact negatively curved manifold and formulate a Berry-type conjecture for sequences of locally symmetric spaces. We prove some weak versions of these conjectures. Using ergodic theory, we also analyze the connections of these conjectures to Quantum Unique Ergodicity.
We review the application of the notion of local convergence on locally finite randomly rooted graphs, known as Benjamini-Schramm convergence, to the calculation of the global eigenvalue density of random matrices from the beta-Gaussian and beta-Laguerre ensembles. By regarding a random matrix as the weighted adjacency matrix of a graph, and choosing the root of such a graph with uniform probability, one can use the Benjamini-Schramm limit to produce the spectral measure of the adjacency operator of the limiting graph. We illustrate how the Wigner semicircle law and the Marchenko-Pastur law ar…
We prove local convergence results for the uniformly random, labelled or unlabelled, graphs from subcritical families. As an example special case, we prove Benjamini-Schramm convergence for the uniform random unlabelled tree. We introduce a compactification of the space of countable (connected) rooted graphs, and use it to generalise the notion of Benjamini-Schramm convergence in order to allow for vertices of infinite degree in the limit object.
We construct a transient bounded-degree graph no transient subgraph of which embeds in any surface of finite genus. Moreover, we construct a transient, Liouville, bounded-degree, Gromov--hyperbolic graph with trivial hyperbolic boundary that has no transient subtree. This answers a question of Benjamini. This graph also yields a (further) counterexample to a conjecture of Benjamini and Schramm.
Benjamini and Schramm introduced the notion of distributional limit of a sequence of graphs with uniformly bounded valence and studied such limits in the case that the involved graphs are planar. We investigate distributional limits of sequences of Riemannian manifolds with bounded curvature which satisfy certain condition of quasi-conformal nature. We then apply our results to somewhat improve Benjamini's and Schramm's original result on the recurrence of the simple random walk on limits of planar graphs. For instance, as an application give a proof of the fact that for graphs in an expander …
We show that the (random) Riemann surfaces of the Angel-Schramm Uniform Infinite Planar Triangulation and of Sheffield's infinite necklace construction are both parabolic. In other words, Brownian motion on these surfaces is recurrent. We obtain this result as a corollary to a more general theorem on subsequential distributional limits of random unbiased disc triangulations, following work of Benjamini and Schramm.
We consider percolation on the Voronoi tessellation generated by a homogeneous Poisson point process on the hyperbolic plane. We show that the critical probability for the existence of an infinite cluster is asymptotically equal to $πλ/3$ as $λ\to0.$ This answers a question of Benjamini and Schramm.
We show that for infinite planar unimodular random rooted maps, many global geometric and probabilistic properties are equivalent, and are determined by a natural, local notion of average curvature. This dichotomy includes properties relating to amenability, conformal geometry, random walks, uniform and minimal spanning forests, and Bernoulli bond percolation. We also prove that every simply connected unimodular random rooted map is sofic, that is, a Benjamini-Schramm limit of finite maps.
Local convergence of bounded degree graphs was introduced by Benjamini and Schramm. This result was extended further by Lyons to bounded average degree graphs. In this paper, we study the convergence of a random tree sequence where the probability of a given tree is proportional to $\prod_{v_i\in V(T)}d(v_i)!$. We show that this sequence is convergent and describe the limit object, which is a random infinite rooted tree.
A conjecture of Benjamini & Schramm from 1996 states that any finitely generated group that is not a finite extension of Z has a non-trivial percolation phase. Our main results prove this conjecture for certain groups, and in particular prove that any group with a non-trivial homomorphism into the additive group of real numbers satisfies the conjecture. We use this to reduce the conjecture to the case of hereditary just-infinite groups. The novelty here is mainly in the methods used, combining the methods of EIT and evolving sets, and using the algebraic properties of the group to apply these …
Answering a question of Benjamini & Schramm [8], we show that the Poisson boundary of any planar, uniquely absorbing (e.g. one-ended and transient) graph with bounded degrees can be realised geometrically as a circle, namely as the boundary of a tiling of a cylinder by squares. This implies a conjecture of Northshield [34] of similar flavour. For our proof we introduce a general criterion for identifying the Poisson boundary of a stochastic process that might have further applications.
Benjamini, Kalai and Schramm (2001) showed that weighted majority functions of $n$ independent unbiased bits are uniformly stable under noise: when each bit is flipped with probability $ε$, the probability $p_ε$ that the weighted majority changes is at most $Cε^{1/4}$. They asked what is the best possible exponent that could replace 1/4. We prove that the answer is 1/2. The upper bound obtained for $p_ε$ is within a factor of $\sqrt{π/2}+o(1)$ from the known lower bound when $ε\to 0$ and $nε\to \infty$.
Local convergence of bounded degree graphs was introduced by Benjamini and Schramm. This result was extended further by Lyons to bounded average degree graphs. In this paper we study the convergence of random tree sequences with given degree distributions. Denote by ${\cal D}_n$ the set of possible degree sequences of a tree on $n$ nodes. Let ${\bm D}_n$ be a random variable on ${\cal D}_n$ and ${\bm T}({\bm D}_n)$ be a uniform random tree with degree sequence ${\bm D}_n$. We show that the sequence ${\bm T}({\bm D}_n)$ converges in probability if and only if ${\bm D}_n\to {\bm D}=({\bm D}(i))_…
We show that the circle packing type of a unimodular random plane triangulation is parabolic if and only if the expected degree of the root is six, if and only if the triangulation is amenable in the sense of Aldous and Lyons. As a part of this, we obtain an alternative proof of the Benjamini-Schramm Recurrence Theorem. Secondly, in the hyperbolic case, we prove that the random walk almost surely converges to a point in the unit circle, that the law of this limiting point has full support and no atoms, and that the unit circle is a realisation of the Poisson boundary. Finally, we show that the…
We study compact three-manifolds with boundary obtained by randomly gluing together truncated tetrahedra along their faces. We prove that, asymptotically almost surely as the number of tetrahedra tends to infinity, these manifolds are connected and have a single boundary component. We prove a law of large numbers for the genus of this boundary component, we show that the Heegaard genus of these manifolds is linear in the number of tetrahedra and we bound their first Betti number. We also show that, asymptotically almost surely as the number of tetrahedra tends to infinity, our manifolds admit …
Pursuing the approach of Angel & Ray, we introduce and study a family of random infinite triangulations of the full-plane that satisfy a natural spatial Markov property. These new random lattices naturally generalize Angel & Schramm's Uniform Infinite Planar Triangulation (UIPT) and are hyperbolic in flavor. We prove that they exhibit a sharp exponential volume growth, are non-Liouville, and that the simple random walk on them has positive speed almost surely. We conjecture that these infinite triangulations are the local limits of uniform triangulations whose genus is proportional to the size…
For a unimodular random graph $(G,ρ)$, we consider deformations of its intrinsic path metric by a (random) weighting of its vertices. This leads to the notion of the conformal growth exponent of $(G,ρ)$, which is the best asymptotic degree of volume growth of balls that can be achieved by such a reweighting. Under moment conditions on the degree of the root, we show that the conformal growth exponent of a unimodular random graph bounds its almost sure spectral dimension. This has interesting consequences for many low-dimensional models. The consequences in dimension two are particularly strong…