Near-critical avalanches in 2D frozen percolation and forest fires

arXiv2106.10183MaRDI QIDQ6370679FDOQ6370679

Authors: Wai-Kit Lam, Pierre Nolin 

Publication date: 18 June 2021

Abstract: We study two closely related processes on the triangular lattice: frozen percolation, where connected components of occupied vertices freeze (they stop growing) as soon as they contain at least $N$ vertices, and forest fire processes, where connected components burn (they become entirely vacant) at rate $zeta>0$. In this paper, we prove that when the density of occupied sites approaches the critical threshold for Bernoulli percolation, both processes display a striking phenomenon: the appearance of near-critical "avalanches". More specifically, we analyze the avalanches, all the way up to the natural characteristic scale of each model, which constitutes an important step toward understanding the self-organized critical behavior of such processes. For frozen percolation, we show in particular that the number of frozen clusters surrounding a given vertex is asymptotically equivalent to $(log(96/5){)}^{-1}loglogN$ as $Noinfty$. A similar mechanism underlies forest fires, enabling us to obtain an analogous result for these processes, but with substantially more work: the number of burnt clusters is equivalent to $(log(96/41){)}^{-1}loglog(zet{a}^{-1})$ as $zetasearrow0$. Moreover, almost all of these clusters have a volume $zet{a}^{-91/55+o(1)}$. For forest fires, the percolation process with impurities introduced in arXiv:1810.08181 plays a crucial role in our proofs, and we extend the results in that paper, up to a positive density of impurities. In addition, we develop a novel exploration procedure to couple full-plane forest fires with processes in finite but large enough (compared to the characteristic scale) domains.

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Interacting random processes; statistical mechanics type models; percolation theory (60K35) Percolation (82B43)

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