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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Series:
Dissertation Defense
Thursday, May 2, 2019 - 1:30pm
1.5 hours (actually 80 minutes)
Location:
Skiles 006
Speaker:
Bounghun Bock
,
Georgia Tech
,
Organizer:
In independent bond percolation with parameter p, if one removes the vertices of the infinite cluster (and incident edges), for which values of p does the remaining graph contain an infinite cluster? Grimmett-Holroyd-Kozma used the triangle condition to show that for d > 18, the set of such p contains values strictly larger than the percolation threshold pc. With the work of Fitzner-van der Hofstad, this has been reduced to d > 10. We reprove this result by showing that for d > 10 and some p>pc, there are infinite paths consisting of "shielded"' vertices --- vertices all whose adjacent edges are closed --- which must be in the complement of the infinite cluster. Using numerical values of pc, this bound can be reduced to d > 7. Our methods are elementary and do not require the triangle condition.
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 d-dimensional space, 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+dp] to the expected number of observed edges (those in the cluster or its boundary) with weight in the same interval. They showed that in all dimensions, the acceptance profile an(p) converges to one for p<pc and to zero for p>pc. In this paper, we consider an(p) at the critical point p=pc in two dimensions and show that it is bounded away from zero and one as n goes to infinity.
