Bigeodesics in first-passage percolation (Q507180)

First-passage percolation (FPP) is a model for the flow of a liquid through a random medium due to \textit{J. M. Hammersley} and \textit{D. J. A. Welsh} [in: Bernoulli-Bayes-Laplace, Anniversary Vol., Proc. Int. Res. Semin., Berkeley 1963, 61--110 (1965; Zbl 0143.40402)]. On the multi-dimensional integer lattice, every edge \(e \in E^d\) that connects two nearest-neighbor sites of \(\mathbb{Z}^d\) is designated a nonnegative random variable \(t_e\), called the passage time of \(e\). Similarly, for every path \(\gamma\) (from some site to another site), its passage time is defined as \(T (\gamma) := \sum_{e \in \gamma} t_e\). Then the random variable \(T (x, y)\) is defined as the infimum of the passage times of all paths from \(x\) to \(y\). Such a minimizing path is called geodesic and a doubly infinite geodesic is called bigeodesic. Assume that the sequence \((t_e)\) is independent and identically distributed with a continuous distribution. Assume also that \(d=2\). A well-known conjecture of Kensten asserts that there are no bigeodesics in two dimensions almost surely. Let the limit shape be a subset of \(\mathbb{R}^2\) that contains all sites \(x\) such that \(T (0, nx) / n \leq 1\) as \(n \to \infty\) almost surely. Given any deterministic direction \(\phi\) (i.e., for a sequence \((x_n)\) of nearest-neighbor sites in a path, \(\|x_n\|\) tends to infinity and the argument of \(x_n\) tends to \(\phi\) as \(n \to \infty\)) and assuming that the boundary of the limit shape is differentiable, the authors show that there is no bigeodesic with one end directed in \(\phi\) almost surely.