The power laws of \(M\) and \(N\) in greedy lattice animals (Q1275950)

The random field given by Bernoulli random variables \(X_v(p)\), \(v\in \mathbb Z^d\), with parameter \(p\) are considered for \(d\geq 2\). Two significant quantities are \[ M_n(p)=\max \Bigl\{\sum _{v\in \pi } X_v(p);\;\pi \in \Pi (n) \Bigr\} \quad\text{and}\quad N_n(p)=\max \Bigl\{\sum _{v\in \eta } X_v(p);\;\eta \in E(n) \Bigr\}, \] where \(\Pi (n)\) is the set of all self-avoiding paths in \(\mathbb Z^d\) of length \(n\) starting at the origin, and \(E(n)\) is the set of all ``connected'' subsets of \(\mathbb Z^d\) of size \(n\). Gandolfi and Kesten showed that there are positive finite limits \(M(p)=\lim_{n\to \infty } M_n(p)\) and \(N(p)=\lim_{n\to \infty } N_n(p)\) almost surely and in \(L_1\). Fontes and Newman gave an upper bound for \(N(p)\) (\(\geq M(p)\)) by \(C_{\varepsilon } p^{1/d+\varepsilon }\) for any \(\varepsilon >0\). It is shown that \(p^{1/d}\) is the exact power for both the upper and lower estimates of \(M(p)\) and \(N(p)\): \[ C_1 p^{1/d}\leq M(p)\leq N(p)\leq C_2 p^{1/d}. \] The asymptotic behaviour of \(M(p)\) and \(N(p)\) for \(p\) tending to the critical parameter \(p_c\) from below is also studied and some partial results are expressed in terms of the correlation length \(\xi (p)\).