English

Exceptional graphs for the random walk

Probability 2018-09-07 v2 Combinatorics

Abstract

If W\mathcal{W} is the simple random walk on the square lattice Z2\mathbb{Z}^2, then W\mathcal{W} induces a random walk WG\mathcal{W}_G on any spanning subgraph GZ2G\subset \mathbb{Z}^2 of the lattice as follows: viewing W\mathcal{W} as a uniformly random infinite word on the alphabet {x,x,y,y}\{\mathbf{x}, -\mathbf{x}, \mathbf{y}, -\mathbf{y} \}, the walk WG\mathcal{W}_G starts at the origin and follows the directions specified by W\mathcal{W}, only accepting steps of W\mathcal{W} along which the walk WG\mathcal{W}_G does not exit GG. For any fixed subgraph GZ2G \subset \mathbb{Z}^2, the walk WG\mathcal{W}_G is distributed as the simple random walk on GG, and hence WG\mathcal{W}_G is almost surely recurrent in the sense that WG\mathcal{W}_G visits every site reachable from the origin in GG infinitely often. This fact naturally leads us to ask the following: does W\mathcal{W} almost surely have the property that WG\mathcal{W}_G is recurrent for \emph{every} subgraph GZ2G \subset \mathbb{Z}^2? We answer this question negatively, demonstrating that exceptional subgraphs exist almost surely. In fact, we show more to be true: exceptional subgraphs continue to exist almost surely for a countable collection of independent simple random walks, but on the other hand, there are almost surely no exceptional subgraphs for a branching random walk.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1805.06277,
  title  = {Exceptional graphs for the random walk},
  author = {Juhan Aru and Carla Groenland and Tom Johnston and Bhargav Narayanan and Alex Roberts and Alex Scott},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1805.06277},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

19 pages, submitted

R2 v1 2026-06-23T01:57:25.175Z