English

Stretched exponential decay for subcritical parking times on $\mathbb{Z}^d$

Probability 2020-08-13 v1

Abstract

In the parking model on Zd\mathbb{Z}^d, each vertex is initially occupied by a car (with probability pp) or by a vacant parking spot (with probability 1p1-p). Cars perform independent random walks and when they enter a vacant spot, they park there, thereby rendering the spot occupied. Cars visiting occupied spots simply keep driving (continuing their random walk). It is known that p=1/2p=1/2 is a critical value in the sense that the origin is a.s. visited by finitely many distinct cars when p<1/2p<1/2, and by infinitely many distinct cars when p1/2p\geq 1/2. Furthermore, any given car a.s. eventually parks for p1/2p \leq 1/2 and with positive probability does not park for p>1/2p > 1/2. We study the subcritical phase and prove that the tail of the parking time τ\tau of the car initially at the origin obeys the bounds exp(C1tdd+2)Pp(τ>t)exp(c2tdd+2) \exp\left( - C_1 t^{\frac{d}{d+2}}\right) \leq \mathbb{P}_p(\tau > t) \leq \exp\left( - c_2 t^{\frac{d}{d+2}}\right) for p>0p>0 sufficiently small. For d=1d=1, we prove these inequalities for all p[0,1/2)p \in [0,1/2). This result presents an asymmetry with the supercritical phase (p>1/2p>1/2), where methods of Bramson--Lebowitz imply that for d=1d=1 the corresponding tail of the parking time of the parking spot of the origin decays like ecte^{-c\sqrt{t}}. Our exponent d/(d+2)d/(d+2) also differs from those previously obtained in the case of moving obstacles.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2008.05072,
  title  = {Stretched exponential decay for subcritical parking times on $\mathbb{Z}^d$},
  author = {Michael Damron and Hanbaek Lyu and David Sivakoff},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2008.05072},
  year   = {2020}
}

Comments

10 pages

R2 v1 2026-06-23T17:47:43.778Z