July 9, 2014
This paper analyzes various questions pertaining to bootstrap percolation on the $d$-dimensional Hamming torus where each node is open with probability $p$ and the percolation threshold is 2. For each $d'<d$ we find the critical exponent for the event that a $d'$-dimensional subtorus becomes open and compute the limiting value of its probability under the critical scaling. For even $d'$, we use the Chen-Stein method to show that the number of $d'$-dimensional subtori that bec...
February 18, 2014
Bootstrap percolation is a cellular automaton modelling the spread of an `infection' on a graph. In this note, we prove a family of lower bounds on the critical probability for $r$-neighbour bootstrap percolation on Galton--Watson trees in terms of moments of the offspring distributions. With this result we confirm a conjecture of Bollob\'as, Gunderson, Holmgren, Janson and Przykucki. We also show that these bounds are best possible up to positive constants not depending on t...
March 29, 2010
We consider bootstrap percolation on uncorrelated complex networks. We obtain the phase diagram for this process with respect to two parameters: $f$, the fraction of vertices initially activated, and $p$, the fraction of undamaged vertices in the graph. We observe two transitions: the giant active component appears continuously at a first threshold. There may also be a second, discontinuous, hybrid transition at a higher threshold. Avalanches of activations increase in size a...
November 6, 2014
Bootstrap percolation provides an emblematic instance of phase behavior characterised by an abrupt transition with diverging critical fluctuations. This unusual hybrid situation generally occurs in particle systems in which the occupation probability of a site depends on the state of its neighbours through a certain threshold parameter. In this paper we investigate the phase behavior of the bootstrap percolation on the regular random graph in the limit in which the threshold ...
April 15, 2014
The theme of this paper is the analysis of bootstrap percolation processes on random graphs generated by preferential attachment. This is a class of infection processes where vertices have two states: they are either infected or susceptible. At each round every susceptible vertex which has at least $r\geq 2$ infected neighbours becomes infected and remains so forever. Assume that initially $a(t)$ vertices are randomly infected, where $t$ is the total number of vertices of the...
August 25, 2021
It is shown here that the percolation cluster that emerges from the percolation process on infinite perfect binary trees, is genuinely an encoding scheme for an infinite set of symbols. The average codeword length and the entropy of such an encoding scheme are still finite as long as the percolation density $p$ is between $1/2\leq p < \sqrt[3]{1/4}$.
October 4, 2009
Recent experimental studies of living neural networks reveal that their global activation induced by electrical stimulation can be explained using the concept of bootstrap percolation on a directed random network. The experiment consists in activating externally an initial random fraction of the neurons and observe the process of firing until its equilibrium. The final portion of neurons that are active depends in a non linear way on the initial fraction. The main result of t...
April 14, 2012
In $r$-neighbor bootstrap percolation on the vertex set of a graph $G$, a set $A$ of initially infected vertices spreads by infecting, at each time step, all uninfected vertices with at least $r$ previously infected neighbors. When the elements of $A$ are chosen independently with some probability $p$, it is natural to study the critical probability $p_c(G,r)$ at which it becomes likely that all of $V(G)$ will eventually become infected. Improving a result of Balogh, Bollob\'...
June 23, 2018
In the $r$-neighbour bootstrap process on a graph $G$, vertices are infected (in each time step) if they have at least $r$ already-infected neighbours. Motivated by its close connections to models from statistical physics, such as the Ising model of ferromagnetism, and kinetically constrained spin models of the liquid-glass transition, the most extensively-studied case is the two-neighbour bootstrap process on the two-dimensional grid $[n]^2$. Around 15 years ago, in a major ...
September 19, 2012
We study the percolation time of the $r$-neighbour bootstrap percolation model on the discrete torus $(\Z/n\Z)^d$. For $t$ at most a polylog function of $n$ and initial infection probabilities within certain ranges depending on $t$, we prove that the percolation time of a random subset of the torus is exactly equal to $t$ with high probability as $n$ tends to infinity. Our proof rests crucially on three new extremal theorems that together establish an almost complete understa...