This paper studies anchored expansion, a non-uniform version of the strong isoperimetric inequality. We show that every graph with i-anchored expansion contains a subgraph with isoperimetric (Cheeger) constant at least i. We prove a conjecture by Benjamini, Lyons and Schramm (1999) that in such graphs the random walk escapes with a positive lim inf speed. We also show that anchored expansion implies a heat-kernel decay bound of order exp(-c n^1/3).
Let $(X_n)_{n\geq 0}$ be a reversible random walk on a graph $G$ satisfying an anchored isoperimetric inequality. We give upper bounds for exit time (and occupation time in transient case) by X of any set which contains the root. As an application, we consider random environments of $\Z^d$.
Benjamini, Lyons and Schramm [Random Walks and Discrete Potential Theory (1999) 56-84] considered properties of an infinite graph G, and the simple random walk on it, that are preserved by random perturbations. In this paper we solve several problems raised by those authors. The anchored expansion constant is a variant of the Cheeger constant; its positivity implies positive lower speed for the simple random walk, as shown by Virag [Geom. Funct. Anal. 10 (2000) 1588-1605]. We prove that if G has a positive anchored expansion constant, then so does every infinite cluster of independent percolat…
We introduce anchored versions of the Nash inequality. They allow to control the $L^2$ norm of a function by Dirichlet forms that are not uniformly elliptic. We then use them to provide heat kernel upper bounds for diffusions in degenerate static and dynamic random environments. As an example, we apply our results to the case of a random walk with degenerate jump rates that depend on an underlying exclusion process at equilibrium.
We show that random walk on a stationary random graph with positive anchored expansion and exponential volume growth has positive speed. We also show that two families of random triangulations of the hyperbolic plane, the hyperbolic Poisson Voronoi tessellation and the hyperbolic Poisson Delaunay triangulation, have 1-skeletons with positive anchored expansion. As a consequence, we show that the simple random walks on these graphs have positive speed. We include a section of open problems and conjectures on the topics of stationary geometric random graphs and the hyperbolic Poisson Voronoi tes…
We give sufficient conditions for a discrete set of points in any dimensional real hyperbolic space to have positive anchored expansion. The first condition is a bounded mean density property, ensuring not too many points can accumulate in large regions. The second is a bounded mean vacancy condition, effectively ensuring there is not too much space left vacant by the points over large regions. These properties give as an easy corollary that stationary Poisson--Delaunay graphs have positive anchored expansion, as well as Delaunay graphs built from stationary determinantal point processes. We i…
Hermon and Hutchcroft have recently proved the long-standing conjecture that in Bernoulli(p) bond percolation on any nonamenable transitive graph G, at any p > p_c(G), the probability that the cluster of the origin is finite but has a large volume n decays exponentially in n. A corollary is that all infinite clusters have anchored expansion almost surely. They have asked if these results could hold more generally, for any finite energy ergodic invariant percolation. We give a counterexample, an invariant percolation on the 4-regular tree.
Let F be a distribution function with negative mean and regularly varying right tail. Under a mild smoothness condition we derive higher order asymptotic expansions for the tail distribution of the maxima of the random walk generated by F. An application to ruin probabilities is developed.
We consider Gaussian fields of real symmetric, complex Hermitian or quaternionic Hermitian matrices over an electrical network, and describe how the isomorphisms between these fields and random walks give rise to topological expansions encoded by ribbon graphs. We further consider matrix-valued Gaussian fields twisted by an orthogonal, unitary or symplectic connection. In this case the isomorphisms involve traces of holonomies of the connection along random walk loops parametrized by boundary cycles of ribbon graphs.
We consider a random walk in random environment in the low disorder regime on $\mathbb Z^d$. That is, the probability that the random walk jumps from a site $x$ to a nearest neighboring site $x+e$ is given by $p(e)+εξ(x,e)$, where $p(e)$ is deterministic, $\{\{ξ(x,e):|e|_1=1\}:x\in\mathbb Z^d\}$ are i.i.d. and $ε>0$ is a parameter which is eventually chosen small enough. We establish an asymptotic expansion in $ε$ for the invariant measure of the environmental process whenever a ballisticity condition is satisfied. As an application of our expansion, we derive a numerical expression up to firs…
Consider a branching random walk, where the branching mechanism is governed by a Galton-Watson process, and the migration by a finite range symmetric irreducible random walk on the integer lattice $\mathbb{Z}^d$. Let $Z_n(z)$ be the number of the particles in the $n$-th generation at the point $z\in \mathbb{Z}^d$. Under the mild moment conditions for offspring distribution of the underlying Galton-Watson, we derive a second order expansion in the local limit theorem for $Z_n(z)$ for each given $z\in \mathbb{Z}^d$. That generalizes the results for simple branching random walks obtained by Gao […
Consider a branching random walk in which the offspring distribution and the moving law both depend on an independent and identically distributed random environment indexed by the time.For the normalised counting measure of the number of particles of generation $n$ in a given region, we give the second and third orders asymptotic expansions of the central limit theorem under rather weak assumptions on the moments of the underlying branching and moving laws. The obtained results and the developed approaches shed light on higher order expansions. In the proofs, the Edgeworth expansion of central…
We prove that for recurrent, reversible graphs, the following conditions are equivalent: (a) existence and uniqueness of the potential kernel, (b) existence and uniqueness of harmonic measure from infinity, (c) a new anchored Harnack inequality, and (d) one-endedness of the wired Uniform Spanning Tree. In particular this gives a proof of the anchored (and in fact also elliptic) Harnack inequality on the UIPT. This also complements and strengthens some results of Benjamini, Lyons, Peres and Schramm. Furthermore, we make progress towards a conjecture of Aldous and Lyons by proving that these con…
Let $(g_n)_{n\geq 1}$ be a sequence of independent and identically distributed random elements with law $μ$ on the general linear group $\textup{GL}(V)$, where $V=\mathbb R^d$. Consider the random walk $G_n : = g_n \ldots g_1$, $n \geq 1$. Under suitable conditions on $μ$, we establish the first-order Edgeworth expansion for the coefficients $\langle f, G_n v \rangle$ with $v \in V$ and $f \in V^*$, in which a new additional term appears compared to the case of vector norm $\|G_n v\|$.
Let $(g_n)_{n\geq 1}$ be a sequence of independent and identically distributed elements of the general linear group $GL(d, \mathbb R)$. Consider the random walk $G_n: = g_n \ldots g_1$. Under suitable conditions, we establish Bahadur-Rao-Petrov type large deviation expansion for the coefficients $\langle f, G_n v \rangle$, where $f \in (\mathbb R^d)^*$ and $v \in \mathbb R^d$. In particular, our result implies the large deviation principle with an explicit rate function, thus improving significantly the large deviation bounds established earlier. Moreover, we establish Bahadur-Rao-Petrov type …
We consider a directed polymer model in dimension $1+1$, where the disorder is given by the occupation field of a Poisson system of independent random walks on $\mathbb Z$. In a suitable continuum and weak disorder limit, we show that the family of quenched partition functions of the directed polymer converges to the Stratonovich solution of a multiplicative stochastic heat equation (SHE) with a Gaussian noise, whose space-time covariance is given by the heat kernel. In contrast to the case with space-time white noise where the solution of the SHE admits a Wiener-Itô chaos expansion, we establ…
Consider a branching random walk on $\mathbb Z$ in discrete time. Denote by $L_n(k)$ the number of particles at site $k\in\mathbb Z$ at time $n\in\mathbb N_0$. By the profile of the branching random walk (at time $n$) we mean the function $k\mapsto L_n(k)$. We establish the following asymptotic expansion of $L_n(k)$, as $n\to\infty$: $$ e^{-φ(0)n} L_n(k) = \frac{e^{-\frac 12 x_n^2(k)}}{\sqrt {2πφ''(0) n}} \sum_{j=0}^r \frac{F_j(x_n(k))}{n^{j/2}} + o\left(n^{-\frac{r+1}{2}}\right) \quad a.s., $$ where $r\in\mathbb N_0$ is arbitrary, $φ(β)=\log \sum_{k\in\mathbb Z} e^{βk} \mathbb E L_1(k)$ is th…
We derive a perturbation expansion for general self-interacting random walks, where steps are made on the basis of the history of the path. Examples of models where this expansion applies are reinforced random walk, excited random walk, the true (weakly) self-avoiding walk, loop-erased random walk, and annealed random walk in random environment. In this paper we show that the expansion gives rise to useful formulae for the speed and variance of the random walk, when these quantities are known to exist. The results and formulae of this paper have been used elsewhere by the authors to prove mono…
We consider random walks in dynamic random environments given by Markovian dynamics on $\mathbb{Z}^d$. We assume that the environment has a stationary distribution $μ$ and satisfies the Poincaré inequality w.r.t. $μ$. The random walk is a perturbation of another random walk (called "unperturbed"). We assume that also the environment viewed from the unperturbed random walk has stationary distribution $μ$. Both perturbed and unperturbed random walks can depend heavily on the environment and are not assumed to be finite-range. We derive a law of large numbers, an averaged invariance principle for…
This paper states a law of large numbers for a random walk in a random iid environment on ${\mathbb Z}^d$, where the environment follows some Dirichlet distribution. Moreover, we give explicit bounds for the asymptotic velocity of the process and also an asymptotic expansion of this velocity at low disorder.
The aim of this survey is to explain, in a self-contained and relatively beginner-friendly manner, the lace expansion for the nearest-neighbor models of self-avoiding walk and percolation that converges in all dimensions above 6 and 9, respectively. To achieve this, we consider a $d$-dimensional version of the body-centered cubic (BCC) lattice, on which it is extremely easy to enumerate various random-walk quantities. Also, we choose a particular set of bootstrapping functions, by which a notoriously complicated part of the lace-expansion analysis becomes rather transparent.
It is known that some matrix integrals over U(n) satisfy an sl(2,R)-algebra of Virasoro constraints. Acting with these Virasoro generators on 2-dimensional Schur function expansions leads to difference relations on the coefficients of this expansions. These difference relations, set equal to zero, are precisely the backward and forward equations for non-intersecting random walks. The transition probabilities for these random walks appear as the coefficients of an expansion of U(n)-matrix integrals (of the type above), by inserting in the integral the product of two Schur polynomials associated…
We prove error bounds in a central limit theorem for solutions of certain convolution equations. The main motivation for investigating these equations stems from applications to lace expansions, in particular to weakly self-avoiding random walks in high dimensions. As an application we treat such self-avoiding walks in continuous space. The bounds obtained are sharper than the ones obtained by other methods.
In the present paper, we study long time asymptotics of non-symmetric random walks on crystal lattices from a view point of discrete geometric analysis due to Kotani and Sunada [11, 23]. We observe that the Euclidean metric associated with the standard realization of the crystal lattice, called the Albanese metric, naturally appears in the asymptotics. In the former half of the present paper, we establish two kinds of (functional) central limit theorems for random walks. We first show that the Brownian motion on the Euclidean space with the Albanese metric appears as the scaling limit of the u…
We study the speed of a biased random walk on a percolation cluster on $\Z^d$ in function of the percolation parameter $p$. We obtain a first order expansion of the speed at $p=1$ which proves that percolating slows down the random walk at least in the case where the drift is along a component of the lattice.
We prove a law of large numbers for random walks in certain kinds of i.i.d. random environments in Z^d that is an extension of a result of Bolthausen, Sznitman and Zeitouni (2003). We use this result, along with the lace expansion for self-interacting random walks, to prove a monotonicity result for the first coordinate of the speed of the random walk under some strong assumptions on the distribution of the environment.
We consider random walks in a random environment of the type p_0+γξ_z, where p_0 denotes the transition probabilities of a stationary random walk on \BbbZ^d, to nearest neighbors, and ξ_z is an i.i.d. random perturbation. We give an explicit expansion, for small γ, of the asymptotic speed of the random walk under the annealed law, up to order 2. As an application, we construct, in dimension d\ge2, a walk which goes faster than the stationary walk under the mean environment.
Let $μ$ be the self-avoiding walk connective constant on $\ZZ^d$. We show that the asymptotic expansion for $β_c=1/μ$ in powers of $1/(2d)$ satisfies Borel type bounds. This supports the conjecture that the expansion is Borel summable.
We give a local central limit theorem for simple random walks on Z^d, including Gaussian error estimates. The detailed proof combines standard large deviation techniques with Cramer-Edgeworth expansions for lattice distributions.
Let $(X,d)$ be a geodesic Gromov-hyperbolic space, $o \in X$ a basepoint and $μ$ a countably supported non-elementary probability measure on $\operatorname{Isom}(X)$. Denote by $z_n$ the random walk on $X$ driven by the probability measure $μ$. Supposing that $μ$ has finite exponential moment, we give a second-order Taylor expansion of the large deviation rate function of the sequence $\frac{1}{n}d(z_n,o)$ and show that the corresponding coefficient is expressed by the variance in the central limit theorem satisfied by the sequence $d(z_n,o)$. This provides a positive answer to a question rais…
For a symmetric random walk in $Z^2$ with $2+δ$ moments, we represent $|\mathcal{R}(n)|$, the cardinality of the range, in terms of an expansion involving the renormalized intersection local times of a Brownian motion. We show that for each $k\geq 1$ \[ (\log n)^k [ \frac{1}{n} |\mathcal{R}(n)| +\sum_{j=1}^k (-1)^j (\textstyle{\frac1{2π}}\log n +c_X)^{-j} γ_{j,n}]\to 0, \qquad a.s. \] where $W_t$ is a Brownian motion, $W^{(n)}_t=W_{nt}/\sqrt n$, $γ_{j,n}$ is the renormalized intersection local time at time 1 for $W^{(n)}$, and $c_X$ is a constant depending on the distribution of the random wal…
We consider a random walk in $\mathbb Z^d$ which jumps from a site $x$ to a nearest neighboring site $x+e$ (where $e\in V:=\{x\in\mathbb Z^d: |x|_1=1\}$) with probability $p_0(e)+εξ(x,e)$. Here $\sum_e p_0(e)=1$, $p_0(e)> 0$, $ε$ is a small parameter while $\{\{ξ(x,e):e\in V\}: x\in\mathbb Z^d\}$ are i.i.d. random variables with an absolute value bounded by $1$. We review recent progress in the non-vanishing velocity case, giving an asymptotic expansion in $ε$ of the invariant measure of the environmental process, and bounds for the velocity.
We derive a continuous-time lace expansion for a broad class of self-interacting continuous-time random walks. Our expansion applies when the self-interaction is a sufficiently nice function of the local time of a continuous-time random walk. As a special case we obtain a continuous-time lace expansion for a class of spin systems that admit continuous-time random walk representations. We apply our lace expansion to the $n$-component $g|φ|^4$ model on $\mathbb{Z}^{d}$ when $n=1,2$, and prove that the critical Green's function $G_{ν_{c}}(x)$ is asymptotically a multiple of $|x|^{2-d}$ when $d\ge…
Let $(g_n)_{n\geq 1}$ be a sequence of independent and identically distributed random elements with law $μ$ on the general linear group $\textrm{GL}(V)$, where $V=\mathbb R^d$. Consider the random walk $G_n : = g_n \ldots g_1$, $n \geq 1$, and the coefficients $\langle f, G_n v \rangle$, where $v \in V$ and $f \in V^*$. Under suitable moment assumptions on $μ$, we prove the strong and weak laws of large numbers and the central limit theorem for $\langle f, G_n v \rangle$, which improve the previous results established under the exponential moment condition on $μ$. We further demonstrate the Be…
Loop-weighted walk with parameter $λ\geq 0$ is a non-Markovian model of random walks that is related to the loop $O(N)$ model of statistical mechanics. A walk receives weight $λ^{k}$ if it contains $k$ loops; whether this is a reward or punishment for containing loops depends on the value of $λ$. A challenging feature of loop-weighted walk is that it is not purely repulsive, meaning the weight of the future of a walk may either increase or decrease if the past is forgotten. Repulsion is typically an essential property for lace expansion arguments. This article circumvents the lack of repulsion…
We consider self-avoiding walk, percolation and the Ising model with long and finite range. By means of the lace expansion we prove mean-field behavior for these models if $d>2(α\wedge2)$ for self-avoiding walk and the Ising model, and $d>3(α\wedge2)$ for percolation, where $d$ denotes the dimension and $α$ the power-law decay exponent of the coupling function. We provide a simplified analysis of the lace expansion based on the trigonometric approach in Borgs et al. (2007)
A conjecture of Mihail and Vazirani states that the edge expansion of the graph of every $0/1$ polytope is at least one. Any lower bound on the edge expansion gives an upper bound for the mixing time of a random walk on the graph of the polytope. Such random walks are important because they can be used to generate an element from a set of combinatorial objects uniformly at random. A weaker form of the conjecture of Mihail and Vazirani says that the edge expansion of the graph of a $0/1$ polytope in $\mathbb{R}^d$ is greater than 1 over some polynomial function of $d$. This weaker version of th…
The lace expansion has been a powerful tool for investigating mean-field behavior for various stochastic-geometrical models, such as self-avoiding walk and percolation, above their respective upper-critical dimension. In this paper, we prove the lace expansion for the Ising model that is valid for any spin-spin coupling. For the ferromagnetic case, we also prove that the expansion coefficients obey certain diagrammatic bounds that are similar to the diagrammatic bounds on the lace-expansion coefficients for self-avoiding walk. As a result, we obtain Gaussian asymptotics of the critical two-poi…
We derive asymptotic estimates for the velocity of random walks in random environments which are perturbations of the simple symmetric random walk but have a small local drift in a given direction. Our estimates complement previous results presented by Sznitman and are in the spirit of expansions obtained by Sabot.
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 show bounds on total variation and $L^{\infty}$ mixing times, spectral gap and magnitudes of the complex valued eigenvalues of a general (non-reversible non-lazy) Markov chain with a minor expansion property. This leads to the first known bounds for the non-lazy simple and max-degree walks on a (directed) graph, and even in the lazy case they are the first bounds of the optimal order. In particular, it is found that within a factor of two or four, the worst case of each of these mixing time and eigenvalue quantities is a walk on a cycle with clockwise drift.
The lace expansion is a powerful tool for analysing the critical behaviour of self-avoiding walks and percolation. It gives rise to a recursion relation which we abstract and study using an adaptation of the inductive method introduced by den Hollander and the authors. We give conditions under which the solution to the recursion relation behaves as a Gaussian, both in Fourier space and in terms of a local central limit theorem. These conditions are shown elsewhere to hold for sufficiently spread-out models of networks of self-avoiding walks in dimensions $d>4$, and for critical oriented percol…
We provide a direct proof of Cramér's theorem for geodesic random walks in a complete Riemannian manifold $(M,g)$. We show how to exploit the vector space structure of the tangent spaces to study large deviation properties of geodesic random walks in $M$. Furthermore, we reveal the geometric obstructions one runs into and overcome these by providing Taylor expansions of the inverse Riemannian exponential map, while also comparing the differential of the exponential map to parallel transport. Finally, we obtain the analogue of Cramér's theorem for geodesic random walks by showing that the curva…
We give evidence that the functional renormalization group (FRG), developed to study disordered systems, may provide a field theoretic description for the loop-erased random walk (LERW), allowing to compute its fractal dimension in a systematic expansion in epsilon=4-d. Up to two loop, the FRG agrees with rigorous bounds, correctly reproduces the leading logarithmic corrections at the upper critical dimension d=4, and compares well with numerical studies. We obtain the universal subleading logarithmic correction in d=4, which can be used as a further test of the conjecture.
