Metastable Behavior of Bootstrap Percolation on Galton-Watson Trees

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...

We consider critical percolation on Galton-Watson trees and prove quenched analogues of classical theorems of critical branching processes. We show that the probability critical percolation reaches depth $n$ is asymptotic to a tree-dependent constant times $n^{-1}$. Similarly, conditioned on critical percolation reaching depth $n$, the number of vertices at depth $n$ in the critical percolation cluster almost surely converges in distribution to an exponential random variable ...

Bootstrap percolation is a type of cellular automaton which has been used to model various physical phenomena, such as ferromagnetism. For each natural number $r$, the $r$-neighbour bootstrap process is an update rule for vertices of a graph in one of two states: `infected' or `healthy'. In consecutive rounds, each healthy vertex with at least $r$ infected neighbours becomes itself infected. Percolation is said to occur if every vertex is eventually infected. Usually, the s...

We consider critical percolation on a supercritical Galton-Watson tree. We show that, when the offspring distribution is in the domain of attraction of an $\alpha$-stable law for some $\alpha \in (1,2)$, or has finite variance, several annealed properties also hold in a quenched setting. In particular, the following properties hold for the critical root cluster on almost every realisation of the tree: (1) the rescaled survival probabilities converge; (2) the Yaglom limit or i...

We study bootstrap percolation with the threshold parameter $\theta \geq 2$ and the initial probability $p$ on infinite periodic trees that are defined as follows. Each node of a tree has degree selected from a finite predefined set of non-negative integers and starting from any node, all nodes at the same graph distance from it have the same degree. We show the existence of the critical threshold $p_f(\theta) \in (0,1)$ such that with high probability, (i) if $p > p_f(\theta...

We examine bootstrap percolation on a regular (b+1)-ary tree with initial law given by Bernoulli(p). The sites are updated according to the usual rule: a vacant site becomes occupied if it has at least theta occupied neighbors, occupied sites remain occupied forever. It is known that, when b>theta>1, the limiting density q=q(p) of occupied sites exhibits a jump at some p_t=p_t(b,theta) in (0,1) from q_t:=q(p_t)<1 to q(p)=1 when p>p_t. We investigate the metastable behavior as...

We study survival properties of inhomogeneous Galton-Watson processes. We determine the so-called branching number (which is the reciprocal of the critical value for percolation) for these random trees (conditioned on being infinite), which turns out to be an a.s.\ constant. We also shed some light on the way the survival probability varies between the generations. When we perform independent percolation on the family tree of an inhomogeneous Galton-Watson process, the result...

We study the onset of the bootstrap percolation transition as a model of generalized dynamical arrest. We develop a new importance-sampling procedure in simulation, based on rare events around "holes", that enables us to access bootstrap lengths beyond those previously studied. By framing a new theory in terms of paths or processes that lead to emptying of the lattice we are able to develop systematic corrections to the existing theory, and compare them to simulations. Thereb...

We analyze the bootstrap percolation process on the stochastic block model (SBM), a natural extension of the Erd\H{o}s--R\'{e}nyi random graph that incorporates the community structure observed in many real systems. In the SBM, nodes are partitioned into two subsets, which represent different communities, and pairs of nodes are independently connected with a probability that depends on the communities they belong to. Under mild assumptions on the system parameters, we prove t...

We revisit the Bootstrap Percolation model, leveraging recent mathematical advances linking it with its local counterpart. This new perspective resolves, for the first time, historic discrepancies between Monte Carlo simulations and theoretical results: previously, those predictions disagreed even in the first-order asymptotics of the model. In contrast, our framework achieves excellent agreement between numerics and theory, which now match up to the third-order expansion, as...