English

Nonexistence of Bigeodesics in Integrable Models of Last Passage Percolation

Probability 2021-02-09 v2 Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

Bi-infinite geodesics are fundamental objects of interest in planar first passage percolation. A longstanding conjecture states that under mild conditions there are almost surely no bigeodesics, however the result has not been proved in any case. For the exactly solvable model of directed last passage percolation on Z2\mathbb{Z}^2 with i.i.d. exponential passage times, we study the corresponding question and show that almost surely the only bigeodesics are the trivial ones, i.e., the horizontal and vertical lines. The proof makes use of estimates for last passage time available from the integrable probability literature to study coalescence structure of finite geodesics, thereby making rigorous a heuristic argument due to Newman.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.1811.04908,
  title  = {Nonexistence of Bigeodesics in Integrable Models of Last Passage Percolation},
  author = {Riddhipratim Basu and Christopher Hoffman and Allan Sly},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:1811.04908},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

27 pages, 6 figures, revised version