English

Frogs on trees?

Probability 2018-02-27 v5

Abstract

We study a system of simple random walks on Td,n=Vd,n,Ed,n)\mathcal{T}_{d,n} = \mathcal{V}_{d,n}, \mathcal{E}_{d,n}), the dd-ary tree of depth nn, known as the frog model. Initially there are Pois(λ\lambda) particles at each site, independently, with one additional particle planted at some vertex o\mathbf{o}. Initially all particles are inactive, except for the ones which are placed at o\mathbf{o}. Active particles perform (independent) tN{} t \in \mathbb{N} \cup \{\infty \} steps of simple random walk on the tree. When an active particle hits an inactive particle, the latter becomes active. The model is often interpreted as a model for a spread of an epidemic. As such, it is natural to investigate whether the entire population is eventually infected, and if so, how quickly does this happen. Let Rt\mathcal{R}_t be the set of vertices which are visited by the process. Let S(Td,n):=inf{t:Rt=Vd,n}\mathcal{S}(\mathcal{T}_{d,n}) := \inf \{t:\mathcal{R}_t = \mathcal{V}_{d,n} \} . Let the cover time CT(Td,n)\mathrm{CT}(\mathcal{T}_{d,n}) be the first time by which every vertex was visited at least once, when we take t=t=\infty. We show that there exist absolute constants, c,C>0c,C>0 such that for all d2d \ge 2 and all λ=λn\lambda = \lambda_n which does not diverge nor vanish too rapidly, with high probability cλS(Td,n)/nlog(n/λ)Cc \le \lambda \mathcal{S}(\mathcal{T}_{d,n}) /n \log (n/\lambda) \le C and CT(Td,n)34logVd,n\mathrm{CT}(\mathcal{T}_{d,n}) \le 3^{4 \sqrt{ \log |\mathcal{V}_{d,n}| }}.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1609.08738,
  title  = {Frogs on trees?},
  author = {Jonathan Hermon},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1609.08738},
  year   = {2018}
}

Comments

46 pages. In the latest version we allow the particle density to depend on n. A few typos corrected. To appear in Electronic Journal of Probability (2018)

R2 v1 2026-06-22T16:03:39.153Z