Extremal Bounds for Bootstrap Percolation in the Hypercube

TL;DR

This paper establishes extremal bounds for bootstrap percolation in high-dimensional hypercubes, proving a conjecture on minimal percolating set sizes and improving bounds for specific cases, using connections to weak saturation.

Contribution

It proves a conjecture on the minimal size of percolating sets in hypercubes for fixed r and large dimensions, and improves bounds for the case r=3.

Findings

Percolating set size in hypercubes is at least (1+o(1))/r * binomial(d, r-1).

Minimum percolating set size for r=3 in hypercubes is exactly ceiling of d(d+3)/6 plus 1.

Connection established between bootstrap percolation and weak saturation processes.

Abstract

The $r$-neighbour bootstrap percolation process on a graph $G$ starts with an initial set $A_0$ of "infected" vertices and, at each step of the process, a healthy vertex becomes infected if it has at least $r$ infected neighbours (once a vertex becomes infected, it remains infected forever). If every vertex of $G$ eventually becomes infected, then we say that $A_0$ percolates. We prove a conjecture of Balogh and Bollob\'as which says that, for fixed $r$ and $d\to\infty$, every percolating set in the $d$-dimensional hypercube has cardinality at least $\frac{1+o(1)}{r}\binom{d}{r-1}$. We also prove an analogous result for multidimensional rectangular grids. Our proofs exploit a connection between bootstrap percolation and a related process, known as weak saturation. In addition, we improve on the best known upper bound for the minimum size of a percolating set in the hypercube. In particular, when $r=3$, we prove that the minimum cardinality of a percolating set in the $d$-dimensional hypercube is $\left\lceil\frac{d(d+3)}{6}\right\rceil+1$ for all $d\geq3$.