Upper Tail Large Deviations in First Passage Percolation

TL;DR

This paper proves the existence of a rate function for upper tail large deviations in first passage percolation on $\

Contribution

It establishes the existence of the rate function under mild conditions and extends the analysis to higher dimensions and last passage percolation.

Findings

Rate function for upper tail large deviations exists under mild assumptions.

The proof generalizes to higher dimensions and last passage percolation.

Atypical limiting metric structures cause large deviations.

Abstract

For first passage percolation on $\mathbb{Z}^2$ with i.i.d. bounded edge weights, we consider the upper tail large deviation event; i.e., the rare situation where the first passage time between two points at distance $n$, is macroscopically larger than typical. It was shown by Kesten (1986) that the probability of this event decays as $\exp (-\Theta(n^2))$. However the question of existence of the rate function i.e., whether the log-probability normalized by $n^2$ tends to a limit, had remained open. We show that under some additional mild regularity assumption on the passage time distribution, the rate function for upper tail large deviation indeed exists. Our proof can be generalized to work in higher dimensions and for the corresponding problem in last passage percolation as well. The key intuition behind the proof is that a limiting metric structure which is atypical causes the upper tail large deviation event. The formal argument then relies on an approximate version of the above which allows us to dilate the large deviation environment to compare the upper tail probabilities for various values of $n.$