Research Study Group
I did my research study group project in stochastic growth models with John Sylvester and Qiaochu Chen supervised by Dr Nikos Zygouras and Dr Partha Dey.
In this project we considered a long-range first-passage percolation model on the lattice
from 'Multiple phase transitions in long-range first passage percolation' under a specific class of distributions supported away from
as in 'Strict inequalities for the time constant in first passage percolation'. We have shown that in the critical and supercritical cases that the limiting shape of an appropriately scaled growth set is the unit
ball and in the subcritical case a limiting shape exists and that under some assumptions this deterministic shape has a flat piece which coincides with that of the nearest neighbour model.
Let
be the edge set for the infinite complete graph on . To each
we assign an independent random weight
, where
are i.i.d. with common distribution
.
We fix then the random variable
represents the passage-time through the edge . For
, a finite
-path, we define the corresponding passage-time to be
Based on these , the first-passage time to reach
from
is defined to be the minimum passage-time over all finite
-paths from
to
:
where is the set of all finite
-paths from
to
. This defines a random metric on
which we refer to as the LRFPP metric. Using this first-passage time define the growth set
which is the ball of radius in this metric.
Cox & Durrett have shown, in their paper 'Some limit theorems for percolation with necessary and sufficient conditions', that in the nearest neighbour case where we use the edge set
that there exists a deterministic limiting shape such that for any
we have that
Marchand, in her paper 'Strict inequalities for the time constant in first passage percolation', (among others) have extended this result to characterise the existence of a flat piece on the boundary of . In particular letting
denote the critical threshold for oriented bond percolation in
and
the asymptotic growth speed of the oriented percolation, we can write
to be the line segment connecting
we have that
If then,
.
If then
.
If then
.
If then
.
We extend these results to the long-range model for three distinct cases depending on the value of .
The critical case is where . Intuitively this is because the first-passage metric has no preference over the lengths of the edges hence there are many more paths to a specific vertex
of optimal length. This isn't the case when
since for the supercritical case
we have that
is concave which means that longer edges are preferred therefore the only path to
which can be made in optimal time is the direct edge from the origin. Similarly, in the subcritical case
we have that
is convex and hence shorter edges are preferred. This means that the only paths to
which can be of optimal length consist of
edges of length
.
Our main results are the following three theorems which show that in the critical case there are only finitely many lattice points which are not reached in optimal time, in the supercritical case the limiting shape of the scaled growth set is the unit ball and in the subcritical case a limiting shape exists and the exact form can be given in terms of the asymptotic speed.
Theorem 1:
If we have that for
that the limiting shape:
exists a.s. and
Theorem 2:
If we have that for
and any
that:
Theorem 3:
If we have that
deterministic such that
Furthermore where
which exists almost surely and in , moreover the convergence is uniform on compact sets.
We have also proven that in the specific case that the distribution has bounded support then the flat piece of the long-range model coincides precisely with that of the nearest neighbour model. Based on this result, our simulation and heuristic arguments we conjecture that the flat piece for the long-range model coincides with that of the nearest neighbour model for any
in the subcritical regime.
References
J.M. Hammersley, D.J.A. Welsh. First-passage percolation, subadditive processes, stochastic networks and generalized renewal theory. Proc. Internat. Res. Semin., Statist. Lab. Univ. California, Berkeley, Calif., pages 61 –110, 1965.
J.T. Cox, R. Durrett. Some limit theorems for percolation with necessary and sufficient conditions. Ann. Appl. Probab., 9:583–603, 1981.
Marchand, R. Strict inequalities for the time constant in first passage percolation. Ann. Appl. Probab., 12:1001–1038, 2002.
S. Chatterjee, P. Dey. Multiple phase transitions in long-range first-passage percolation on square lattices. preprint. http://arxiv.org/abs/1309.5757.