The scaling limit of the critical percolation, is it a black noise? The answer depends on stability to perturbations concentrated along a line. This text, containing no proofs, reports experimental results that suggest the affirmative answer.
We state and prove a version for invasion percolation of Schramm and Smirnov's (2001) discrete gluing theorem for critical planar percolation. The result is a first step toward establishing factorization and characterizing noise sensitivity for invasion percolation.
We study frozen percolation on the (planar) triangular lattice, where connected components stop growing ("freeze") as soon as their "size" becomes at least $N$, for some parameter $N \geq 1$. The size of a connected component can be measured in several natural ways, and we consider the two particular cases of diameter and volume (i.e. number of sites). Diameter-frozen and volume-frozen percolation have been studied in previous works, and they display radically different behaviors. These works adopt the rule that the boundary of a frozen cluster stays vacant forever, and we investigate the infl…
We prove the existence of phase transitions in the global connectivity of the excursion sets of planar symmetric shot noise fields. Our main result establishes a phase transition with respect to the level for shot noise fields with symmetric log-concave mark distributions, including Gaussian, uniform, and Laplace marks, and kernels that are positive, symmetric, and have sufficient tail decay. Without the log-concavity assumption we prove a phase transition with respect to the intensity of positive marks.
A large and sparse random graph with independent exponentially distributed link weights can be used to model the propagation of messages or diseases in a network with an unknown connectivity structure. In this article we study an extended setting where also the nodes of the graph are equipped with nonnegative random weights which are used to model the effect of boundary delays across paths in the network. Our main results provide approximative formulas for typical first passage times, typical flooding times, and maximum flooding times in the extended setting, over a time scale logarithmic with…
We consider first-passage percolation on the two-dimensional triangular lattice $\mathcal{T}$. Each site $v\in\mathcal{T}$ is assigned independently a passage time of either $0$ or $1$ with probability $1/2$. Denote by $B^+(0,n)$ the upper half-disk with radius $n$ centered at $0$, and by $c_n^+$ the first-passage time in $B^+(0,n)$ from $0$ to the half-circular boundary of $B^+(0,n)$. We prove \[\lim_{n\rightarrow\infty}\frac{c_n^+}{\log n}=\frac{\sqrt{3}}{2π}~ a.s.,~\lim_{n\rightarrow\infty}\frac{E c_n^+}{\log n}=\frac{\sqrt{3}}{2π},~\lim_{n\rightarrow\infty}\frac{\mathrm{Var}(c_n^+)}{\log n…
First-passage percolation is a random growth model defined using i.i.d. edge-weights $(t_e)$ on the nearest-neighbor edges of $\mathbb{Z}^d$. An initial infection occupies the origin and spreads along the edges, taking time $t_e$ to cross the edge $e$. In this paper, we study the size of the boundary of the infected ("wet") region at time $t$, $B(t)$. It is known that $B(t)$ grows linearly, so its boundary $\partial B(t)$ has size between $ct^{d-1}$ and $Ct^d$. Under a weak moment condition on the weights, we show that for most times, $\partial B(t)$ has size of order $t^{d-1}$ (smooth). On th…
In this paper we study noise sensitivity and threshold phenomena for Poisson Voronoi percolation on $\mathbb{R}^2$. In the setting of Boolean functions, both threshold phenomena and noise sensitivity can be understood via the study of randomized algorithms. Together with a simple discretization argument, such techniques apply also to the continuum setting. Via the study of a suitable algorithm we show that box-crossing events in Voronoi percolation are noise sensitive and present a threshold phenomenon with polynomial window. We also study the effect of other kinds of perturbations, and emphas…
Let $d\geq 2$. We consider an i.i.d. supercritical bond percolation on $\mathbb{Z}^d$, every edge is open with a probability $p>p_c(d)$, where $p_c(d)$ denotes the critical point. We condition on the event that $0$ belongs to the infinite cluster $\mathcal{C}_\infty$ and we consider connected subgraphs of $\mathcal{C}_\infty$ having at most $n^d$ vertices and containing $0$. Among these subgraphs, we are interested in the ones that minimize the open edge boundary size to volume ratio. These minimizers properly rescaled converge towards a translate of a deterministic shape and their open edge b…
Consider critical Bernoulli percolation in the plane. We give a new proof of the sharp noise sensitivity theorem shown by Garban, Pete and Schramm. Contrary to the previous approaches, we do not use any spectral tool. We rather study differential inequalities satisfied by a dynamical four-arm event, in the spirit of Kesten's proof of scaling relations. We also obtain new results in dynamical percolation. In particular, we prove that the Hausdorff dimension of the set of times with both primal and dual percolation equals $2/3$ a.s.
We study the isoperimetric subgraphs of the giant component $\textbf{C}_n$ of supercritical bond percolation on the square lattice. These are subgraphs of $\textbf{C}_n$ having minimal edge boundary to volume ratio. In contrast to the work of Biskup, Louidor, Procaccia and Rosenthal, the edge boundary is taken only within $\textbf{C}_n$ instead of the full infinite cluster. The isoperimetric subgraphs are shown to converge almost surely, after rescaling, to the collection of optimizers of a continuum isoperimetric problem emerging naturally from the model. We also show that the Cheeger constan…
Let $Q$ be a free Boltzmann quadrangulation with simple boundary decorated by a critical ($p=3/4$) face percolation configuration. We prove that the chordal percolation exploration path on $Q$ between two marked boundary edges converges in the scaling limit to chordal SLE$_6$ on an independent $\sqrt{8/3}$-Liouville quantum gravity disk (equivalently, a Brownian disk). The topology of convergence is the Gromov-Hausdorff-Prokhorov-uniform topology, the natural analog of the Gromov-Hausdorff topology for curve-decorated metric measure spaces. We also obtain analogous scaling limit results for fa…
We show that planar Bargmann-Fock percolation is noise sensitive under the Ornstein-Ulhenbeck process. The proof is based on the randomized algorithm approach introduced by Schramm and Steif and gives quantitative polynomial bounds on the noise sensitivity of crossing events for Bargmann-Fock. A rather counter-intuitive consequence is as follows. Let $F$ be a Bargmann-Fock Gaussian field in $\mathbb{R}^3$ and consider two horizontal planes $P_1,P_2$ at small distance $\varepsilon$ from each other. Even though $F$ is a.s. analytic, the above noise sensitivity statement implies that the full res…
We consider the Bernoulli percolation model in a finite box and we introduce an automatic control of the percolation probability, which is a function of the percolation configuration. For a suitable choice of this automatic control, the model is self-critical, i.e., the percolation probability converges to the critical point $p_c$ when the size of the box tends to infinity. We study here three simple examples of such models, involving the size of the largest cluster, the number of vertices connected to the boundary of the box, or the distribution of the cluster sizes.
Invasion percolation is a stochastic growth model that follows a greedy algorithm. After assigning i.i.d. uniform random variables (weights) to all edges of $\mathbb{Z}^d$, the growth starts at the origin. At each step, we adjoin to the current cluster the edge of minimal weight from its boundary. In '85, Chayes-Chayes-Newman studied the `acceptance profile' of the invasion: for a given $p \in [0,1]$, it is the ratio of the expected number of invaded edges until time $n$ with weight in $[p,p+\text{d}p]$ to the expected number of observed edges (those in the cluster or its boundary) with weight…
We initiate the study on chemical distances of percolation clusters for level sets of two-dimensional discrete Gaussian free fields as well as loop clusters generated by two-dimensional random walk loop soups. One of our results states that the chemical distance between two macroscopic annuli away from the boundary for the random walk loop soup at the critical intensity is of dimension 1 with positive probability. Our proof method is based on an interesting combination of a theorem of Makarov, isomorphism theory and an entropic repulsion estimate for Gaussian free fields in the presence of a h…
We introduce the Incipient Infinite Cluster (IIC) in the critical Bernoulli site percolation model on the Uniform Infinite Half-Planar Triangulation (UIHPT), which is the local limit of large random triangulations with a boundary. The IIC is defined from the UIHPT by conditioning the open percolation cluster of the origin to be infinite. We prove that the IIC can be obtained by adding within the UIHPT an infinite triangulation with a boundary whose distribution is explicit.
We discuss duality properties of critical Boltzmann planar maps such that the degree of a typical face is in the domain of attraction of a stable distribution with parameter $α\in(1,2]$. We consider the critical Bernoulli bond percolation model on a Boltzmann map in the dilute and generic regimes $α\in (3/2,2]$, and show that the open percolation cluster of the origin is itself a Boltzmann map in the dense regime $α\in (1,3/2)$, with parameter \[α':= \frac{2α+3}{4α-2}.\] This is the counterpart in random planar maps of the duality property $κ\leftrightarrow 16/κ$ of Schramm-Loewner Evolutions …
We consider critical percolation on the triangular lattice in a bounded simply connected domain with boundary conditions that force an interface between two prescribed boundary points. We say the interface forms a "near-loop" when it comes within one lattice spacing of itself. We define a new curve by erasing these near-loops as we traverse the interface. Our Monte Carlo simulations of this model lead us to conclude that the scaling limit of this loop-erased percolation interface is conformally invariant and has fractal dimension 4/3. However, it is not SLE_8/3. We also consider the process in…
Proofs of sharp phase transition and noise sensitivity in percolation have been significantly simplified by the use of randomized algorithms, via the OSSS inequality (proved by O'Donnell, Saks, Schramm and Servedio (2005)) and the Schramm-Steif inequality for the Fourier-Walsh coefficients of functions defined on the Boolean hypercube. In this article, we prove intrinsic versions of the OSSS and Schramm-Steif inequalities for functionals of a general Poisson process, and apply these new estimates to deduce sufficient conditions - expressed in terms of randomized stopping sets - yielding sharp …
We develop an unsupervised, nonparametric, and scalable statistical learning method for detection of unknown objects in noisy images. The method uses results from percolation theory and random graph theory. We present an algorithm that allows to detect objects of unknown shapes and sizes in the presence of nonparametric noise of unknown level. The noise density is assumed to be unknown and can be very irregular. The algorithm has linear complexity and exponential accuracy and is appropriate for real-time systems. We prove strong consistency and scalability of our method in this setup with mini…
Despite great progress in the study of critical percolation on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ for $d$ large, properties of critical clusters in high-dimensional fractional spaces and boxes remain poorly understood, unlike the situation in two dimensions. Closely related models such as critical branching random walk give natural conjectures for the value of the relevant high-dimensional critical exponents; see in particular the conjecture by Kozma-Nachmias that the probability that $0$ and $(n, n, n, \ldots)$ are connected within $[-n,n]^d$ scales as $n^{-2-2d}$. In this paper, we study the properties of criti…