English

On the Manhattan pinball problem

Probability 2021-02-18 v2 Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

We consider the periodic Manhattan lattice with alternating orientations going north-south and east-west. Place obstructions on vertices independently with probability 0<p<10<p<1. A particle is moving on the edges with unit speed following the orientation of the lattice and it will turn only when encountering an obstruction. The problem is that for which value of pp is the trajectory of the particle closed almost surely. We prove this for p>12εp>\frac{1}{2}-\varepsilon with some ε>0\varepsilon>0.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2006.10797,
  title  = {On the Manhattan pinball problem},
  author = {Linjun Li},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2006.10797},
  year   = {2021}
}

Comments

11 pages, 10 figures; added more references in the introduction, simplified the construction for enhancement, added more details in the proof of the main theorem, added appendix A to explain how to adapt the enhancement argument to our sepecific case, fixed typos, main result unchanged

R2 v1 2026-06-23T16:26:51.867Z