Anomalous heat-kernel decay for random walk among bounded random conductances (Q731675)

The authors are concerned with the nearest-neighbor simple random walk on \(\mathbb{Z}^{d},\;d\geq 2\), driven by a field of bounded random conductances \(\omega _{xy}\in \left[ 0,1\right]\). The conductance law is i.i.d. subject to the condition that the probability of \(\omega _{xy}>0\) exceeds the threshold for bond percolation on \(\mathbb{Z}^{d}\). For environments in which the origin is connected to infinity by bonds with positive conductances, the authors study the decay of the \(2n\)-step return probability \(P_{\omega }^{2n}\left( 0,0\right) \) and prove that is bounded by a random constant times \(n^{-d/2}\) when \(d=2,3,\) while it is \(o\left( n^{-2}\right)\) for \(d\geq 5\) and \(O\left(n^{-2}\log n\right) \) for \(d=4\). By producing examples with anomalous heat-kernel decay approaching \(1/n^{2}\), it is proved that the \(o\left( n^{-2}\right) \) bound for \(d\geq 5\) is the best possible. Natural \(n\)-dependent environments that exhibit the extra \( \log \;n\) factor for \(d=4\) are also constructed.