Large void zones and occupation times for coalescing random walks (Q2485754)

The authors consider a system of interacting particles with a special property of coalescence. Particles start from every point of a \(d\)-dimensional lattice \(Z^{d}\) and perform independent simple random walks in continuous time; the epochs at which each particle jumps from its position form a simple Poisson process with a rate unity. In such a transition, the particle moves from its position \(x\in Z^{d}\) to any of the \(2d\) neighbouring sites of \(x\) with a uniform probability equal to \(1/2d.\) The interaction between the particles is specified through fusion as follows: when a particle jumps to a site which is already occupied by another particle, fusion occurs; in other words the two particles coalesce into one, the resulting particle executes a similar random walk. For each \(x\in Z_d\) denote by \(\xi^{d}(x, t )\) the position occupied by a particle at time epoch \(t\) \((> 0)\) starting from the position \(x\) initially (at \(t =0\)). Define \(\xi^{d}(t) = \xi^{d}(x, t )\), where \(x\in Z^{d}, R^{d}(t) = \inf \| x\|\). The infimum is over all \(x\in \xi^{d}(t)\) and \(||x||\) is the Euclidean modulus of \(x\in Z^{d}.\) In other words \(R^{d}(t)\) is the radius of the largest ball centred at the origin not containing any site occupied by \(\xi^{d}(t).\) The authors prove that the limit supremum as \(T\rightarrow \infty\) of \(R^{1}(T)/(T\log\log T)^{1/2}=1\text{ a.s.}\) For dimension \(2,\) the authors show that the limit supremum as \(T\rightarrow \infty\) of \(R^{2}(T)(\log T)^{1/2}/(T \log\log T)^{1/2}\) is bounded between two fixed positive constants in almost sure sense. Finally for \(d >2,\) the authors prove that the limit supremum as \(T\rightarrow \infty\) of \(R^{d}(T)/(T \log T)^{1/d}\) lies almost surely between two fixed constants.