We consider the hard-core model on a finite square grid graph with stochastic Glauber dynamics parametrized by the inverse temperature $\beta$. We investigate how the transition between its two maximum-occupancy configurations takes place in the low-temperature regime $\beta \to \infty$ in the case of periodic boundary conditions. The hard-core constraints and the grid symmetry make the structure of the critical configurations for this transition, also known as essential saddles, very rich and complex. We provide a comprehensive geometrical characterization of these configurations that together constitute a bottleneck for the Glauber dynamics in the low-temperature limit. In particular, we develop a novel isoperimetric inequality for hard-core configurations with a fixed number of particles and show how the essential saddles are characterized not only by the number of particles but also their geometry.

We consider interacting urns on a finite directed network, where both sampling and reinforcement processes depend on the nodes of the network. This extends previous research by incorporating node-dependent sampling and reinforcement. We classify the sampling and reinforcement schemes, as well as the networks on which the proportion of balls of either colour in each urn converges almost surely to a deterministic limit. We also investigate conditions for achieving synchronisation of the colour proportions across the urns and analyse fluctuations under specific conditions on the reinforcement scheme and network structure.

We introduce and study a game-theoretic model to understand the spread of an epidemic in a homogeneous population. A discrete-time stochastic process is considered where, in each epoch, first, a randomly chosen agent updates their action trying to maximize a proposed utility function, and then agents who have viral exposures beyond their immunity get infected. Our main results discuss asymptotic limiting distributions of both the cardinality of the subset of infected agents and the action profile, considered under various values of two parameters (initial action and immunity profile). We also show that the theoretical distributions are almost always achieved in the first few epochs.

The box-ball systems are integrable cellular automata whose long-time behavior is characterized by soliton solutions, with rich connections to other integrable systems such as the Korteweg-de Vries equation. In this paper, we consider a multicolor box-ball system with two types of random initial configurations and obtain sharp scaling limits of the soliton lengths as the system size tends to infinity. We obtain a sharp scaling limit of soliton lengths that turns out to be more delicate than that in the single color case established in [LLP20]. A large part of our analysis is devoted to studying the associated carrier process, which is a multidimensional Markov chain on the orthant, whose excursions and running maxima are closely related to soliton lengths. We establish the sharp scaling of its ruin probabilities, Skorokhod decomposition, strong law of large numbers and weak diffusive scaling limit to a semimartingale reflecting Brownian motion with explicit parameters. We also establish and utilize complementary descriptions of the soliton lengths and numbers in terms of modified Greene-Kleitman invariants for the box-ball systems and associated circular exclusion processes.

We consider the constrained-degree percolation model in a random environment (CDPRE) on the square lattice. In this model, each vertex v has an independent random constraint $\kappa_v$ which takes the value $j\in \{0,1,2,3\}$ with probability $\rho_j$. The dynamics is as follows: at time $t=0$ all edges are closed; each edge e attempts to open at a random time $U(e)\sim \mathrm{U}(0,1]$, independently of all the other edges. It succeeds if at time U(e) both its end vertices have degrees strictly smaller than their respective constraints. We obtain exponential decay of the radius of the open cluster of the origin at all times when its expected size is finite. Since CDPRE is dominated by Bernoulli percolation, this result is meaningful only if the supremum of all values of t for which the expected size of the open cluster of the origin is finite is larger than $\frac12$. We prove this last fact by showing a sharp phase transition for an intermediate model.

We answer the following question: if the occupied (or vacant) set of a planar Poisson Boolean percolation model contains a crossing of an $n\times n$ square, how wide is this crossing? The answer depends on whether we consider the critical, sub-, or super-critical regime, and is different for the occupied and vacant sets.

We introduce gradient flow aggregation, a random growth model. Given existing particles $\{x_1,\ldots,x_n\} \subset \mathbb{R}^2$, a new particle arrives from a random direction at $\infty$ and flows in direction of the vector field $\nabla E$ where $ E(x) = \sum_{i=1}^{n}{1}/{\|x-x_i\|^{\alpha}}$, $0 < \alpha < \infty$. The case $\alpha = 0$ refers to the logarithmic energy ${-}\sum\log\|x-x_i\|$. Particles stop once they are at distance 1 from one of the existing particles, at which point they are added to the set and remain fixed for all time. We prove, under a non-degeneracy assumption, a Beurling-type estimate which, via Kesten’s method, can be used to deduce sub-ballistic growth for $0 \leq \alpha < 1$, $\text{diam}(\{x_1,\ldots,x_n\}) \leq c_{\alpha} \cdot n^{({3 \alpha +1})/({2\alpha + 2})}$. This is optimal when $\alpha = 0$. The case $\alpha = 0$ leads to a ‘round’ full-dimensional tree. The larger the value of $\alpha$, the sparser the tree. Some instances of the higher-dimensional setting are also discussed.

We derive an asymptotic expansion for the critical percolation density of the random connection model as the dimension of the encapsulating space tends to infinity. We calculate rigorously the first expansion terms for the Gilbert disk model, the hyper-cubic model, the Gaussian connection kernel, and a coordinate-wise Cauchy kernel.

We study the low-temperature $(2+1)$D solid-on-solid model on with zero boundary conditions and nonnegative heights (a floor at height $0$). Caputo et al. (2016) established that this random surface typically admits either $\mathfrak h $ or $\mathfrak h+1$ many nested macroscopic level line loops $\{\mathcal L_i\}_{i\geq 0}$ for an explicit $\mathfrak h\asymp \log L$, and its top loop $\mathcal L_0$ has cube-root fluctuations: For example, if $\rho (x)$ is the vertical displacement of $\mathcal L_0$ from the bottom boundary point $(x,0)$, then $\max \rho (x) = L^{1/3+o(1)}$ over . It is believed that rescaling $\rho $ by $L^{1/3}$ and $I_0$ by $L^{2/3}$ would yield a limit law of a diffusion on $[-1,1]$. However, no nontrivial lower bound was known on $\rho (x)$ for a fixed $x\in I_0$ (e.g., $x=\frac L2$), let alone on $\min \rho (x)$ in $I_0$, to complement the bound on $\max \rho (x)$. Here, we show a lower bound of the predicted order $L^{1/3}$: For every $\epsilon>0$, there exists $\delta>0$ such that $\min _{x\in I_0} \rho (x) \geq \delta L^{1/3}$ with probability at least $1-\epsilon $. The proof relies on the Ornstein–Zernike machinery due to Campanino–Ioffe–Velenik and a result of Ioffe, Shlosman and Toninelli (2015) that rules out pinning in Ising polymers with modified interactions along the boundary. En route, we refine the latter result into a Brownian excursion limit law, which may be of independent interest. We further show that in a $ K L^{2/3}\times K L^{2/3}$ box with boundary conditions $\mathfrak h-1,\mathfrak h,\mathfrak h,\mathfrak h$ (i.e., $\mathfrak h-1$ on the bottom side and $\mathfrak h$ elsewhere), the limit of $\rho (x)$ as $K,L\to \infty $ is a Ferrari–Spohn diffusion.

The binary contact path process (BCPP) introduced in Griffeath (1983) describes the spread of an epidemic on a graph and is an auxiliary model in the study of improving upper bounds of the critical value of the contact process. In this paper, we are concerned with limit theorems of the occupation time of a normalized version of the BCPP (NBCPP) on a lattice. We first show that the law of large numbers of the occupation time process is driven by the identity function when the dimension of the lattice is at least 3 and the infection rate of the model is sufficiently large conditioned on the initial state of the NBCPP being distributed with a particular invariant distribution. Then we show that the centered occupation time process of the NBCPP converges in finite-dimensional distributions to a Brownian motion when the dimension of the lattice and the infection rate of the model are sufficiently large and the initial state of the NBCPP is distributed with the aforementioned invariant distribution.

We investigate the hyperuniformity of marked Gibbs point processes that have weak dependencies among distant points whilst the interactions of close points are kept arbitrary. Various stability and range assumptions are imposed on the Papangelou intensity in order to prove that the resulting point process is not hyperuniform. The scope of our results covers many frequently used models, including Gibbs point processes with a superstable, lower-regular, integrable pair potential, as well as the Widom–Rowlinson model with random radii and Gibbs point processes with interactions based on Voronoi tessellations and nearest-neighbour graphs.

Let $\mathcal{V}$ and $\mathcal{U}$ be the point sets of two independent homogeneous Poisson processes on $\mathbb{R}^d$. A graph $\mathcal{G}_\mathcal{V}$ with vertex set $\mathcal{V}$ is constructed by first connecting pairs of points (v, u) with $v\in\mathcal{V}$ and $u\in\mathcal{U}$ independently with probability $g(v-u)$, where g is a non-increasing radial function, and then connecting two points $v_1,v_2\in\mathcal{V}$ if and only if they have a joint neighbor $u\in\mathcal{U}$. This gives rise to a random intersection graph on $\mathbb{R}^d$. Local properties of the graph, including the degree distribution, are investigated and quantified in terms of the intensities of the underlying Poisson processes and the function g. Furthermore, the percolation properties of the graph are characterized and shown to differ depending on whether g has bounded or unbounded support.

We define the co-spectral radius of inclusions ${\mathcal S}\leq {\mathcal R}$ of discrete, probability- measure-preserving equivalence relations as the sampling exponent of a generating random walk on the ambient relation. The co-spectral radius is analogous to the spectral radius for random walks on $G/H$ for inclusion $H\leq G$ of groups. For the proof, we develop a more general version of the 2–3 method we used in another work on the growth of unimodular random rooted trees. We use this method to show that the walk growth exists for an arbitrary unimodular random rooted graph of bounded degree. We also investigate how the co-spectral radius behaves for hyperfinite relations, and discuss new critical exponents for percolation that can be defined using the co-spectral radius.

We obtain the asymptotic behaviour of the longest increasing/non-decreasing subsequences in a random uniform multiset permutation in which each element in $\{1,\dots,n\}$ occurs k times, where k may depend on n. This generalises the famous Ulam–Hammersley problem of the case $k=1$. The proof relies on poissonisation and on a careful non-asymptotic analysis of variants of the Hammersley–Aldous–Diaconis particle system.

This paper considers the family of invariant measures of Markovian mean-field interacting particle systems on a countably infinite state space and studies its large deviation asymptotics. The Freidlin–Wentzell quasipotential is the usual candidate rate function for the sequence of invariant measures indexed by the number of particles. The paper provides two counterexamples where the quasipotential is not the rate function. The quasipotential arises from finite-horizon considerations. However, there are certain barriers that cannot be surmounted easily in any finite time horizon, but these barriers can be crossed in the stationary regime. Consequently, the quasipotential is infinite at some points where the rate function is finite. After highlighting this phenomenon, the paper studies some sufficient conditions on a class of interacting particle systems under which one can continue to assert that the Freidlin–Wentzell quasipotential is indeed the rate function.

We study heterogeneously interacting diffusive particle systems with mean-field-type interaction characterized by an underlying graphon and their finite particle approximations. Under suitable conditions, we obtain exponential concentration estimates over a finite time horizon for both 1- and 2-Wasserstein distances between the empirical measures of the finite particle systems and the averaged law of the graphon system.

We consider bond percolation on high-dimensional product graphs $G=\square _{i=1}^tG^{(i)}$, where $\square$ denotes the Cartesian product. We call the $G^{(i)}$ the base graphs and the product graph $G$ the host graph. Very recently, Lichev (J. Graph Theory, 99(4):651–670, 2022) showed that, under a mild requirement on the isoperimetric properties of the base graphs, the component structure of the percolated graph $G_p$ undergoes a phase transition when $p$ is around $\frac{1}{d}$, where $d$ is the average degree of the host graph.

In the supercritical regime, we strengthen Lichev’s result by showing that the giant component is in fact unique, with all other components of order $o(|G|)$, and determining the sharp asymptotic order of the giant. Furthermore, we answer two questions posed by Lichev (J. Graph Theory, 99(4):651–670, 2022): firstly, we provide a construction showing that the requirement of bounded degree is necessary for the likely emergence of a linear order component; secondly, we show that the isoperimetric requirement on the base graphs can be, in fact, super-exponentially small in the dimension. Finally, in the subcritical regime, we give an example showing that in the case of irregular high-dimensional product graphs, there can be a polynomially large component with high probability, very much unlike the quantitative behaviour seen in the Erdős-Rényi random graph and in the percolated hypercube, and in fact in any regular high-dimensional product graphs, as shown by the authors in a companion paper (Percolation on high-dimensional product graphs. arXiv:2209.03722, 2022).

We determine almost sure limits of rescaled intrinsic volumes of the construction steps of fractal percolation in ${\mathbb R}^d$ for any dimension $d\geq 1$. We observe a factorization of these limit variables which allows one, in particular, to determine their expectations and covariance structure. We also show the convergence of the rescaled expectations and variances of the intrinsic volumes of the construction steps to the expectations and variances of the limit variables, and we give rates for this convergence in some cases. These results significantly extend our previous work, which addressed only limits of expectations of intrinsic volumes.

A spread-out lattice animal is a finite connected set of edges in $\{\{x,y\}\subset \mathbb{Z}^d\;:\;0\lt \|x-y\|\le L\}$. A lattice tree is a lattice animal with no loops. The best estimate on the critical point $p_{\textrm{c}}$ so far was achieved by Penrose (J. Stat. Phys. 77, 3–15, 1994) : $p_{\textrm{c}}=1/e+O(L^{-2d/7}\log L)$ for both models for all $d\ge 1$. In this paper, we show that $p_{\textrm{c}}=1/e+CL^{-d}+O(L^{-d-1})$ for all $d\gt 8$, where the model-dependent constant $C$ has the random-walk representation

\begin{align*} C_{\textrm{LT}}=\sum _{n=2}^\infty \frac{n+1}{2e}U^{*n}(o),&& C_{\textrm{LA}}=C_{\textrm{LT}}-\frac 1{2e^2}\sum _{n=3}^\infty U^{*n}(o), \end{align*}

$U^{*n}$

$n$

$d$

$\{x\in{\mathbb R}^d\;: \|x\|\le 1\}$

$p$

We study the asymptotic limit of random pure dimer coverings on rail yard graphs when the mesh sizes of the graphs go to 0. Each pure dimer covering corresponds to a sequence of interlacing partitions starting with an empty partition and ending in an empty partition. Under the assumption that the probability of each dimer covering is proportional to the product of weights of present edges, we obtain the limit shape (law of large numbers) of the rescaled height functions and the convergence of the unrescaled height fluctuations to a diffeomorphic image of the Gaussian free field (Central Limit Theorem), answering a question in [7]. Applications include the limit shape and height fluctuations for pure steep tilings [9] and pyramid partitions [20; 36; 39; 38]. The technique to obtain these results is to analyze a class of Macdonald processes which involve dual partitions as well.