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Competitive Erosion is Conformally Invariant

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Abstract

We study a graph-theoretic model of interface dynamics called competitive erosion. Each vertex of the graph is occupied by a particle, which can be either red or blue. New red and blue particles are emitted alternately from their respective bases and perform random walk. On encountering a particle of the opposite color they remove it and occupy its position. We consider competitive erosion on discretizations of ‘smooth’, planar, simply connected, domains. The main result of this article shows that at stationarity, with high probability, the blue and the red regions are separated by the level curves of the Green function, with Neumann boundary conditions, which are orthogonal circular arcs on the disc and hyperbolic geodesics on a general, simply connected domain. This establishes conformal invariance of the model.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Statistics, University of California, Berkeley, USA

    Shirshendu Ganguly

  2. Microsoft Research, Redmond, WA, USA

    Yuval Peres

Authors
  1. Shirshendu Ganguly
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  2. Yuval Peres
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Correspondence to Shirshendu Ganguly.

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Communicated by H. Duminil-Copin

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Ganguly, S., Peres, Y. Competitive Erosion is Conformally Invariant. Commun. Math. Phys. 362, 455–511 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00220-018-3196-7

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00220-018-3196-7

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