Universality for critical heavy-tailed network models: metric structure of maximal components (Q2184610)

It is a combined effort of all the authors in this paper without which a tremendous work of this magnitude would not have happened. It is totally mind blowing and the results are very deep. In statistical physics, comprehending the behavior of a complex system at criticality is extremely pertinent. The critical behavior of percolation is in tandem with the study of optimal paths in networks, especially in the strong disorder regime. A well-known conjecture in this direction is the following: The intrinsic nature of the critical behavior does not depend on the exact description of the model, but only on moment conditions on the degree distribution. The authors were inspired by this conjecture and it led to this work. The entire work is focused towards establishing the existence of a sequence of random measured metric spaces satisfying certain assumptions which are too technical to mention here. Along the journey they prove results about the configuration model in the barely subcritical regime and describe the configuration model and the critical behavior of percolation. They also provide a detailed discussion regarding the relevance of the results and their interpretations of some open problems. To sum up, it is a laudable effort towards a very difficult problem.