English

Avoidance couplings on non-complete graphs

Probability 2020-10-14 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

A coupling of random walkers on the same finite graph, who take turns sequentially, is said to be an avoidance coupling if the walkers never collide. Previous studies of these processes have focused almost exclusively on complete graphs, in particular how many walkers an avoidance coupling can include. For other graphs, apart from special cases, it has been unsettled whether even two non-colliding simple random walkers can be coupled. In this article, we construct such a coupling on (i) any dd-regular graph avoiding a fixed subgraph depending on dd; and (ii) any square-free graph with minimum degree at least three. A corollary of the first result is that a uniformly random regular graph on nn vertices admits an avoidance coupling with high probability.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2001.11524,
  title  = {Avoidance couplings on non-complete graphs},
  author = {Erik Bates and Moumanti Podder},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2001.11524},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

27 pages, 5 figures, minor revisions