Decay of correlations in nearest-neighbor self-avoiding walk, percolation, lattice trees and animals

These lecture notes provide a rapid introduction to a number of rigorous results on self-avoiding walks, with emphasis on the critical behaviour. Following an introductory overview of the central problems, an account is given of the Hammersley--Welsh bound on the number of self-avoiding walks and its consequences for the growth rates of bridges and self-avoiding polygons. A detailed proof that the connective constant on the hexagonal lattice equals $\sqrt{2+\sqrt{2}}$ is then...

We consider self-avoiding walk, percolation and the Ising model with long and finite range. By means of the lace expansion we prove mean-field behavior for these models if $d>2(\alpha\wedge2)$ for self-avoiding walk and the Ising model, and $d>3(\alpha\wedge2)$ for percolation, where $d$ denotes the dimension and $\alpha$ the power-law decay exponent of the coupling function. We provide a simplified analysis of the lace expansion based on the trigonometric approach in Borgs e...

We prove several rigorous results about the asymptotic behaviour of the numbers of polygons and self-avoiding walks confined to a square on the square lattice. Specifically we prove that the dominant asymptotic behaviour of polygons confined to an LxL square is identical to that of self-avoiding walks that cross an LxL square from one corner vertex to the opposite corner vertex. We also prove a result about the subdominant asymptotic behaviour of self-avoiding walks crossing ...

We consider instances of long-range percolation on $\mathbb Z^d$ and $\mathbb R^d$, where points at distance $r$ get connected by an edge with probability proportional to $r^{-s}$, for $s\in (d,2d)$, and study the asymptotic of the graph-theoretical (a.k.a. chemical) distance $D(x,y)$ between $x$ and $y$ in the limit as $|x-y|\to\infty$. For the model on $\mathbb Z^d$ we show that, in probability as $|x|\to\infty$, the distance $D(0,x)$ is squeezed between two positive multip...

We consider connectivity properties of certain i.i.d. random environments on $\Z^d$, where at each location some steps may not be available. Site percolation and oriented percolation can be viewed as special cases of the models we consider. In such models, one of the quantities most often studied is the (random) set of vertices that can be reached from the origin by following a connected path. More generally, for the models we consider, multiple different types of connectivit...

Consider critical site percolation on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ with $d \geq 2$. We prove a lower bound of order $n^{- d^2}$ for point-to-point connection probabilities, where $n$ is the distance between the points. Most of the work in our proof concerns a `construction' which finally reduces the problem to a topological one. This is then solved by applying a topological fact, which follows from Brouwer's fixed point theorem. Our bound improves the lower bound with exponent $2 d (d-1)$,...

We consider lattice self-avoiding walks and discuss the dynamic critical behavior of two dynamics that use local and bilocal moves and generalize the usual reptation dynamics. We determine the integrated and exponential autocorrelation times for several observables, perform a dynamic finite-size scaling study of the autocorrelation functions, and compute the associated dynamic critical exponents $z$. For the variables that describe the size of the walks, in the absence of int...

We investigate the percolative properties of the vacant set left by random interlacements on Z^d, when d is large. A non-negative parameter u controls the density of random interlacements on Z^d. It is known from arXiv:0704.2560, and arXiv:0808.3344, that there is a non-degenerate critical value u_*, such that the vacant set at level u percolates when u < u_*, and does not percolate when u > u_*. Little is known about u_*, however for large d, random interlacements on Z^d, ou...

This paper extends the inductive approach to the lace expansion of van der Hofstad and Slade in order to prove Gaussian asymptotic behaviour for models with critical dimension other than 4. The results are applied by Holmes to study sufficiently spread-out lattice trees in dimensions d>8 and may also be applicable to percolation in dimensions d>6.

For independent nearest-neighbour bond percolation on Z^d with d >> 6, we prove that the incipient infinite cluster's two-point function and three-point function converge to those of integrated super-Brownian excursion (ISE) in the scaling limit. The proof is based on an extension of the new expansion for percolation derived in a previous paper, and involves treating the magnetic field as a complex variable. A special case of our result for the two-point function implies that...