English

Diameter and mixing time of the giant component in the percolated hypercube

Probability 2026-05-07 v4 Combinatorics

Abstract

We consider bond percolation on the dd-dimensional binary hypercube with p=c/dp=c/d for fixed c>1c>1. We prove that the typical diameter of the giant component L1L_1 is of order Θ(d)\Theta(d), and the typical mixing time of the lazy random walk on L1L_1 is of order Θ(d2)\Theta(d^2). This resolves long-standing open problems of Bollob\'as, Kohayakawa and {\L}uczak from 1994, and of Benjamini and Mossel from 2003. A key component in our approach is a new tight large deviation estimate on the number of vertices in L1L_1 whose proof includes several novel ingredients: a structural description of the residue outside the giant component after sprinkling, a tight quantitative estimate on the spread of the giant in the hypercube, and a stability principle which rules out the disintegration of large connected sets under thinning. This toolkit further allows us to obtain optimal bounds on the expansion in L1L_1.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2510.13348,
  title  = {Diameter and mixing time of the giant component in the percolated hypercube},
  author = {Michael Anastos and Sahar Diskin and Lyuben Lichev and Maksim Zhukovskii},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2510.13348},
  year   = {2026}
}