Sharp metastability threshold for two-dimensional bootstrap percolation (Q1400818)

The bootstrap percolation process in two dimensions is considered. For a subset \(K\) of the two-dimensional integer lattice \(Z^2\), the set \(B(K)\) is defined as \[ B(K)= K\cup\{x\in Z^2 :| N(x)\cap K| \geq 2\}, \] where \(N(x)\) is the nearest neighborhood of the site \(x\). Further, let us denote \(\langle K\rangle = \lim_{t\rightarrow\infty}B^t (K)\), where \(B^t\) denotes the \(t\)th iterate. Now for a fixed \(p\in [0,1]\) let \(X\) be a random subset of \(Z^2\) in which each site is independently included with probability \(p\). And a set \(K\subseteq Z^2\) is said to be internally spanned if \(\langle X\cap K\rangle = K\). The main aim of the paper consists in studying the limit behaviour of the term \(I(L,p) = P_p( R(L,L)\) is internally spanned) where \(R(L,L)\) is the square of size \(L\). It is proved that \(I(L,p) \rightarrow 1\) if \(\liminf p \log(L)>\lambda\) and \(I(L,p) \rightarrow 0\) if \(\limsup p \log(L)<\lambda\) where \(\lambda = \pi^2 /18\). The same behaviour is proved, with the same threshold \(\lambda\), for the probability that a site is active by time \(L\) in the process on the infinite lattice. Similar results hold for a modified bootstrap percolation model (with a slightly modified definition of the set \(B(K)\)), but with the threshold \(\lambda = \pi^2 /6\).