We show that the law of the three-dimensional uniform spanning tree (UST) is tight under rescaling in a space whose elements are measured, rooted real trees, continuously embedded into Euclidean space. We also establish that the relevant laws actually converge along a particular scaling sequence. The techniques that we use to establish these results are further applied to obtain various properties of the intrinsic metric and measure of any limiting space, including showing that the Hausdorff dimension of such is given by $3/β$, where $β\approx 1.624\dots$ is the growth exponent of three-dimensional loop-erased random walk. Additionally, we study the random walk on the three-dimensional uniform spanning tree, deriving its walk dimension (with respect to both the intrinsic and Euclidean metric) and its spectral dimension, demonstrating the tightness of its annealed law under rescaling, and deducing heat kernel estimates for any diffusion that arises as a scaling limit.
We study simple random walk on the uniform spanning tree on Z^2 . We obtain estimates for the transition probabilities of the random walk, the distance of the walk from its starting point after n steps, and exit times of both Euclidean balls and balls in the intrinsic graph metric. In particular, we prove that the spectral dimension of the uniform spanning tree on Z^2 is 16/13 almost surely.
We prove that the scaling limit of loop-erased random walk in a simply connected domain $D$ is equal to the radial SLE(2) path in $D$. In particular, the limit exists and is conformally invariant. It follows that the scaling limit of the uniform spanning tree in a Jordan domain exists and is conformally invariant. Assuming that the boundary of the domain is a $C^1$ simple closed curve, the same method is applied to show that the scaling limit of the uniform spanning tree Peano curve, where the tree is wired along a proper arc $A$ on the boundary, is the chordal SLE(8) path in the closure of $D…
We study rotor walk, a deterministic counterpart of the simple random walk, on infinite transient graphs. We show that the final rotor configuration of the rotor walk follows the law of the wired uniform spanning forest oriented toward infinity (OWUSF) measure when the initial rotor configuration is sampled from OWUSF. This result holds for all graphs for which each tree in the wired spanning forest has one single end almost surely. This answers a question posed in a previous work of the author (Chan 2018).
We study rotor walks on transient graphs with initial rotor configuration sampled from the oriented wired uniform spanning forest (OWUSF) measure. We show that the expected number of visits to any vertex by the rotor walk is at most equal to the expected number of visits by the simple random walk. In particular, this implies that this walk is transient. When these two numbers coincide, we show that the rotor configuration at the end of the process also has the law of OWUSF. Furthermore, if the graph is vertex-transitive, we show that the average number of visits by $n$ consecutive rotor walks …
Let x and y be points chosen uniformly at random from $\Z_n^4$, the four-dimensional discrete torus with side length n. We show that the length of the loop-erased random walk from x to y is of order $n^2 (\log n)^{1/6}$, resolving a conjecture of Benjamini and Kozma. We also show that the scaling limit of the uniform spanning tree on $\Z_n^4$ is the Brownian continuum random tree of Aldous. Our proofs use the techniques developed by Peres and Revelle, who studied the scaling limits of the uniform spanning tree on a large class of finite graphs that includes the d-dimensional discrete torus for…
Let x and y be chosen uniformly in a graph G. We find the limiting distribution of the length of a loop-erased random walk from x to y on a large class of graphs that include the discrete torus in dimensions 5 and above. Moreover, on this family of graphs we show that a suitably normalized finite-dimensional scaling limit of the uniform spanning tree is a Brownian continuum random tree.
We construct a natural discrete random field on $\mathbb{Z}^{d}$, $d\geq 5$ that converges weakly to the bi-Laplacian Gaussian field in the scaling limit. The construction is based on assigning i.i.d. Bernoulli random variables on each component of the uniform spanning forest, thus defines an associated random function. To our knowledge, this is the first natural discrete model (besides the discrete bi-Laplacian Gaussian field) that converges to the bi-Laplacian Gaussian field.
We show that for finite-range, symmetric random walks on general transient Cayley graphs, the expected occupation time of any given ball of radius $r$ is $O(r^{5/2})$.. We also study the volume-growth property of the wired spanning forests on general Cayley graphs, showing that the expected number of vertices in the component of the identity inside any given ball of radius $r$ is $O(r^{11/2})$.
The uniform spanning forest measure ($\mathsf{USF}$) on a locally finite, infinite connected graph $G$ with conductance $c$ is defined as a weak limit of uniform spanning tree measure on finite subgraphs. Depending on the underlying graph and conductances, the corresponding $\mathsf{USF}$ is not necessarily concentrated on the set of spanning trees. Pemantle~\cite{PR1991} showed that on $\mathbb{Z}^d$, equipped with the unit conductance $ c=1$, $\mathsf{USF}$ is concentrated on spanning trees if and only if $d \leq 4$. In this work we study the $\mathsf{USF}$ associated with conductances induc…
We consider uniform spanning tree (UST) in topological polygons with $2N$ marked points on the boundary with alternating boundary conditions. In [LPW21], the authors derive the scaling limit of the Peano curve in the UST. They are variants of SLE$_8$. In this article, we derive the scaling limit of the loop-erased random walk branch (LERW) in the UST. They are variants of SLE$_2$. The conclusion is a generalization of [HLW20,Theorem 1.6] where the authors derive the scaling limit of the LERW branch of UST when $N=2$. When $N=2$, the limiting law is SLE$_2(-1,-1; -1, -1)$. However, the limiting…
The uniform spanning tree (UST) and the loop-erased random walk (LERW) are related probabilistic processes. We consider the limits of these models on a fine grid in the plane, as the mesh goes to zero. Although the existence of scaling limits is still unproven, subsequential scaling limits can be defined in various ways, and do exist. We establish some basic a.s. properties of the subsequential scaling limits in the plane. It is proved that any LERW subsequential scaling limit is a simple path, and that the trunk of any UST subsequential scaling limit is a topological tree, which is dense in t…
We show how to compute the probabilities of various connection topologies for uniformly random spanning trees on graphs embedded in surfaces. As an application, we show how to compute the "intensity" of the loop-erased random walk in ${\mathbb Z}^2$, that is, the probability that the walk from (0,0) to infinity passes through a given vertex or edge. For example, the probability that it passes through (1,0) is 5/16; this confirms a conjecture from 1994 about the stationary sandpile density on ${\mathbb Z}^2$. We do the analogous computation for the triangular lattice, honeycomb lattice and ${\m…
The uniform spanning forest (USF) in Z^d is the weak limit of random, uniformly chosen, spanning trees in [-n,n]^d. Pemantle proved that the USF consists a.s. of a single tree if and only if d <= 4. We prove that any two components of the USF in Z^d are adjacent a.s. if 5 <= d <= 8, but not if d >= 9. More generally, let N(x,y) be the minimum number of edges outside the USF in a path joining x and y in Z^d. Then a.s. max{N(x,y) : x,y in Z^d} is the integer part of (d-1)/4. The notion of stochastic dimension for random relations in the lattice is introduced and used in the proof.
We prove that the uniform spanning forests of $\mathbb{Z}^d$ and $\mathbb{Z}^{\ell}$ have qualitatively different connectivity properties whenever $\ell >d \geq 4$. In particular, we consider the graph formed by contracting each tree of the uniform spanning forest down to a single vertex, which we call the component graph. We introduce the notion of ubiquitous subgraphs and show that the set of ubiquitous subgraphs of the component graph changes whenever the dimension changes and is above $8$. To separate dimensions $5,6,7,$ and $8$, we prove a similar result concerning ubiquitous subhypergrap…
The first main result of this paper is that the law of the (rescaled) two-dimensional uniform spanning tree is tight in a space whose elements are measured, rooted real trees continuously embedded into Euclidean space. Various properties of the intrinsic metrics, measures and embeddings of the subsequential limits in this space are obtained, with it being proved in particular that the Hausdorff dimension of any limit in its intrinsic metric is almost surely equal to $8/5$. In addition, the tightness result is applied to deduce that the annealed law of the simple random walk on the two-dimensio…
Let $\mathcal{U}$ be the uniform spanning tree on $\mathbb{Z}^3$, whose probability law is denoted by $\mathbf{P}$. For $\mathbf{P}$-a.s. realization of $\mathcal{U}$, the recurrence of the the simple random walk on $\mathcal{U}$ is proved in [5] and it is also demonstrated in [8] that two independent simple random walks on $\mathcal{U}$ collide infinitely often. In this article, we will give a quantitative estimate on the number of collisions of two independent simple random walks on $\mathcal{U}$, which provides another proof of the infinite collision property of $\mathcal{U}$.
We construct forests that span $\mathbb{Z}^d$, $d\geq2$, that are stationary and directed, and whose trees are infinite, but for which the subtrees attached to each vertex are as short as possible. For $d\geq3$, two independent copies of such forests, pointing in opposite directions, can be pruned so as to become disjoint. From this, we construct in $d\geq3$ a stationary, polynomially mixing and uniformly elliptic environment of nearest-neighbor transition probabilities on $\mathbb{Z}^d$, for which the corresponding random walk disobeys a certain zero--one law for directional transience.
We consider stationary measures of the one-dimensional discrete-time quantum walks (QWs) with two chiralities, which is defined by a 2 times 2 unitary matrix U. In our previous paper [15], we proved that any uniform measure becomes the stationary measure of the QW by solving the corresponding eigenvalue problem. This paper reports that non-uniform measures are also stationary measures of the QW except U is diagonal. For diagonal matrices, we show that any stationary measure is uniform. Moreover, we prove that any uniform measure becomes a stationary measure for more general QWs not by solving …
We prove that in both the free and the wired uniform spanning forest (FUSF and WUSF) of any unimodular random rooted network (in particular, of any Cayley graph), it is impossible to distinguish the connected components of the forest from each other by invariantly defined graph properties almost surely. This confirms a conjecture of Benjamini, Lyons, Peres and Schramm. We use this to answer positively two additional questions of Benjamini, Lyons, Peres and Schramm under the assumption of unimodularity. We prove that on any unimodular random rooted network, the FUSF is either connected or has i…
We provide a uniformly-positive point-wise lower bound for the two-point function of the classical spin $O(N)$ model on the torus of $\mathbb{Z}^d$, $d \geq 3$, when $N \in \mathbb{N}_{>0}$ and the inverse temperature $β$ is large enough. This is a new result when $N>2$ and extends the classical result of Fröhlich, Simon and Spencer (1976). Our bound follows from a new site-monotonicity property of the two-point function which is of independent interest and holds not only for the spin $O(N)$ model with arbitrary $N \in \mathbb{N}_{>0}$, but for a wide class of systems of interacting random wal…
Considering the wired uniform spanning forest on a nonunimodular transitive graph, we show that almost surely each tree of the wired uniform spanning forest is light. More generally we study the tilted volumes for the trees in the wired uniform spanning forest. Regarding the free uniform spanning forest, we consider several families of nonunimodular transitive graphs. We show that the free uniform spanning forest is the same as the wired one on Diestel--Leader graphs. For grandparent graphs, we show that the free uniform spanning forest is connected and has branching number bigger than one. We…
In the randomly-oriented Manhattan lattice, every line in $\mathbb{Z}^d$ is assigned a uniform random direction. We consider the directed graph whose vertex set is $\mathbb{Z}^d$ and whose edges connect nearest neighbours, but only in the direction fixed by the line orientations. Random walk on this directed graph chooses uniformly from the $d$ legal neighbours at each step. We prove that this walk is superdiffusive in two and three dimensions. The model is diffusive in four and more dimensions.
In this paper, we present a quantum Bernoulli noises approach to quantum walks on hypercubes. We first obtain an alternative description of a general hypercube and then, based on the alternative description, we find that the operators $\partial_k^* + \partial_k$ behave actually as the shift operators, where $\partial_k$ and $\partial_k^*$ are the annihilation and creation operators acting on Bernoulli functionals, respectively. With the above operators as the shift operators on the position space, we introduce a discrete-time quantum walk model on a general hypercube and obtain an explicit for…
We show that the local limit of the uniform spanning tree on any finite, simple, connected, regular graph sequence with degree tending to infinity is the Poisson(1) branching process conditioned to survive forever. An extension to "almost" regular graphs and a quenched version are also given.
There are several good reasons you might want to read about uniform spanning trees, one being that spanning trees are useful combinatorial objects. Not only are they fundamental in algebraic graph theory and combinatorial geometry, but they predate both of these subjects, having been used by Kirchoff in the study of resistor networks. This article addresses the question about spanning trees most natural to anyone in probability theory, namely what does a typical spanning tree look like?
We prove that if a unimodular random rooted graph is recurrent, the number of ends of its uniform spanning tree is almost surely equal to the number of ends of the graph. Together with previous results in the transient case, this completely resolves the problem of the number of ends of wired uniform spanning forest components in unimodular random rooted graphs and confirms a conjecture of Aldous and Lyons (2006).
We study the entropy of the distribution of the set R_n of vertices visited by a simple random walk on a graph with bounded degrees in its first n steps. It is shown that this quantity grows linearly in the expected size of R_n if the graph is uniformly transient, and sublinearly in the expected size if the graph is uniformly recurrent with subexponential volume growth. This in particular answers a question asked by Benjamini, Kozma, Yadin and Yehudayoff (arXiv:0903.3179v1).
Let ${\mathcal U}_δ$ be the uniform spanning tree on $δ\mathbb{Z}^{3}$. A spanning cluster of ${\mathcal U}_δ$ is a connected component of the restriction of ${\mathcal U}_δ$ to the unit cube $[0,1]^{3}$ that connects the left face $\{ 0 \} \times [0,1]^{2}$ to the right face $\{ 1 \} \times [0,1]^{2}$. In this note, we will prove that the number of the spanning clusters is tight as $δ\to 0$, which resolves an open question raised by Benjamini (1999).
We study the 2-dimensional uniform prudent self-avoiding walk, which assigns equal probability to all nearest-neighbor self-avoiding paths of a fixed length that respect the prudent condition, namely, the path cannot take any step in the direction of a previously visited site. The uniform prudent walk has been investigated with combinatorial techniques in [Bousquet-Mélou, 2010], while another variant, the kinetic prudent walk has been analyzed in detail in [Beffara, Friedli and Velenik, 2010]. In this paper, we prove that the $2$-dimensional uniform prudent walk is ballistic and follows one of…
Let $\mathcal{U}$ be the uniform spanning tree on $\mathbb{Z}^{3}$. We show the occurrence of log-logarithmic fluctuations around the leading order for the volume of intrinsic balls in $\mathcal{U}$. As an application, we obtain similar fluctuations for the quenched heat kernel of the simple random walk on $\mathcal{U}$.
It has hitherto been known that in a transitive unimodular graph, each tree in the wired spanning forest has only one end a.s. We dispense with the assumptions of transitivity and unimodularity, replacing them with a much broader condition on the isoperimetric profile that requires just slightly more than uniform transience.
We study spanning trees on Sierpinski graphs (i.e., finite approximations to the Sierpinski gasket) that are chosen uniformly at random. We construct a joint probability space for uniform spanning trees on every finite Sierpinski graph and show that this construction gives rise to a multi-type Galton-Watson tree. We derive a number of structural results, for instance on the degree distribution. The connection between uniform spanning trees and loop-erased random walk is then exploited to prove convergence of the latter to a continuous stochastic process. Some geometric properties of this limit…
We present two long-time limit theorems of a 3-state quantum walk on the line when the walker starts from the origin. One is a limit measure which is obtained from the probability distribution of the walk at a long-time limit, and the other is a convergence in distribution for the walker's position in a rescaled space by time. In addition, as an application of the walk, we obtain discrete uniform limit measures from the 3-state walk with a delocalized initial state.
In this paper we construct uniformly expanding random walks on smooth manifolds. In higher dimensions, our definition of uniform expansion measures the growth of subspaces rather than single vectors. Potrie showed that given any open set $U$ of $\text{Diff}^\infty_{vol}(\mathbb{T}^2)$, there exists an uniformly expanding random walk $μ$ supported on a finite subset of $U$. In this paper we extend those results to closed manifolds of any dimension, building on the work of Potrie and Chung to build a robust class of examples.
We consider dense graph sequences that converge to a connected graphon and prove that the GHP scaling limit of their uniform spanning trees is Aldous' Brownian CRT. Furthermore, we are able to extract the precise scaling constant from the limiting graphon. As an example, we can apply this to the scaling limit of the uniform spanning trees of the Erdös-Rényi sequence $(G(n,p))_{n \geq 1}$ for any fixed $p \in (0,1]$, and sequences of dense expanders. A consequence of GHP convergence is that several associated quantities of the spanning trees also converge, such as the height, diameter and law o…
In this note we study the geometry of the component of the origin in the Uniform Spanning Forest of $\mathbb{Z}^d$, as well as in the Uniform Spanning Tree of wired subgraphs of $\mathbb{Z}^d$, when $d \ge 5$. In particular, we study connectivity properties with respect to the Euclidean and the intrinsic distance. We intend to supplement these with further estimates in the future. We are making this preliminary note available, as one of our estimates is used in work of Bhupatiraju, Hanson and Járai on sandpiles.
We prove results for random walks in dynamic random environments which do not require the strong uniform mixing assumptions present in the literature. We focus on the "environment seen from the walker"-process and in particular its invariant law. Under general conditions it exists and is mutually absolutely continuous to the environment law. With stronger assumptions we obtain for example uniform control on the density or a quenched CLT. The general conditions are made more explicit by looking at hidden Markov models or Markov chains as environment and by providing simple examples.
We study the pioneer points of the simple random walk on the uniform infinite planar quadrangulation (UIPQ) using an adaptation of the peeling procedure of Angel to the quadrangulation case. Our main result is that, up to polylogarithmic factors, $n^3$ pioneer points have been discovered before the walk exits the ball of radius $n$ in the UIPQ. As a result we verify the KPZ relation in the particular case of the pioneer exponent and prove that the walk is subdiffusive with exponent less than 1/3. Along the way, new geometric controls on the UIPQ are established.
We study a one-dimensional random walk among random conductances, with unbounded jumps. Assuming the ergodicity of the collection of conductances and a few other technical conditions (uniform ellipticity and polynomial bounds on the tails of the jumps) we prove a quenched \textit{uniform} invariance principle for the random walk. This means that the rescaled trajectory of length $n$ is (in a certain sense) close enough to the Brownian motion, uniformly with respect to the choice of the starting location in an interval of length $O(\sqrt{n})$ around the origin.
Consider the nearest neighbor graph for the integer lattice Z^d in d dimensions. For a large finite piece of it, consider choosing a spanning tree for that piece uniformly among all possible subgraphs that are spanning trees. As the piece gets larger, this approaches a limiting measure on the set of spanning graphs for Z^d. This is shown to be a tree if and only if d=<4. In this case, the tree has only one topological end, i.e. there are no doubly infinite paths. When d>=5 the spanning forest has infinitely many components almost surely, with each component having one or two topological ends.
We show that the diameter of a uniformly drawn spanning tree of a simple connected graph on $n$ vertices with minimal degree linear in $n$ is typically of order $\sqrt{n}$. A byproduct of our proof, which is of independent interest, is that on such graphs the Cheeger constant and the spectral gap are comparable.
We start by introducing avoidance coupling of Markov chains, with an overview of existing results. We then introduce and motivate a new notion, uniform avoidance coupling. We show that the only Markovian avoidance coupling on a cycle is of this type, and that uniform avoidance coupling of simple random walks is impossible on trees, and prove that it is possible on several classes of graphs. We also derive a condition on the vertex neighborhoods in a graph equivalent to that graph admitting a uniform avoidance coupling of simple random walks, and an algorithm that tests this with run time polyn…
We show that the diameter of a uniformly drawn spanning tree of a connected graph on $n$ vertices which satisfies certain high-dimensionality conditions typically grows like $Θ(\sqrt{n})$. In particular this result applies to expanders, finite tori $\mathbb{Z}_m^d$ of dimension $d \geq 5$, the hypercube $\{0,1\}^m$, and small perturbations thereof.
We prove that the free uniform spanning forest of any bounded degree proper plane graph is connected almost surely, answering a question of Benjamini, Lyons, Peres and Schramm. We provide a quantitative form of this result, calculating the critical exponents governing the geometry of the uniform spanning forests of transient proper plane graphs with bounded degrees and codegrees. We find that the same exponents hold universally over this entire class of graphs provided that measurements are made using the hyperbolic geometry of their circle packings rather than their usual combinatorial geomet…
We calculate explicit speeds for random walks in uniform degenerate random environments. For certain non-uniform random environments, we calculate speeds that are non-monotone.
We study a one-dimensional random walk among random conductances, with unbounded jumps. Assuming the ergodicity of the collection of conductances and a few other technical conditions (uniform ellipticity and polynomial bounds on the tails of the jumps) we prove a quenched \textit{conditional} invariance principle for the random walk, under the condition that it remains positive until time $n$. As a corollary of this result, we study the effect of conditioning the random walk to exceed level $n$ before returning to 0 as $n\to \infty$. One of the main tools for proving these conditional limit la…
We prove that a uniformized variant of both the Rosenthal walk \cite{Rosenthal} and the Kac random walk \cite{Kac} on SO(n) mixes in $\cO(n^3)$ steps in total variation distance. The proof also extends easily to Rosenthal walk with fixed angle $θ\neq π$. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first polynomial time bound for both walks. The techniques employed are mainly from representation theory of SO(n). But a crucial new ingredient is the interpretation of the Fourier coefficients of the character ratio as counting the number of particle cascade paths arising from the classical branching…
We prove that every component of the wired uniform spanning forest (WUSF) is one-ended almost surely in every transient reversible random graph, removing the bounded degree hypothesis required by earlier results. We deduce that every component of the WUSF is one-ended almost surely in every supercritical Galton-Watson tree, answering a question of Benjamini, Lyons, Peres and Schramm. Our proof introduces and exploits a family of Markov chains under which the oriented WUSF is stationary, which we call the wired cycle-breaking dynamics.
For any graph having a suitable uniform Poincare inequality and volume growth regularity, we establish two-sided Gaussian transition density estimates and parabolic Harnack inequality, for constant speed continuous time random walks evolving via time varying, uniformly elliptic conductances, provided the vertex conductances (i.e. reversing measures), increase in time. Such transition density upper bounds apply for discrete time uniformly lazy walks, with the matching lower bounds holding once the parabolic Harnack inequality is proved.
We show that the Brownian continuum random tree is the Gromov-Hausdorff-Prohorov scaling limit of the uniform spanning tree on high-dimensional graphs including the $d$-dimensional torus $\mathbb{Z}_n^d$ with $d>4$, the hypercube $\{0,1\}^n$, and transitive expander graphs. Several corollaries for associated quantities are then deduced: convergence in distribution of the rescaled diameter, height and simple random walk on these uniform spanning trees to their continuum analogues on the continuum random tree.
