Mean Field Behavior during the Big Bang Regime for Coalescing Random Walks

TL;DR

This paper investigates the decay behavior of coalescing random walks during the early 'Big Bang' phase on various graphs, revealing mean field behavior under certain conditions and connecting decay rates to meeting times and graph properties.

Contribution

It establishes a unified framework for analyzing the decay of occupied sites in coalescing random walks, linking it to graph transience, meeting times, and spectral properties, with new results for specific graph families.

Findings

For configuration model graphs, $P_t$ decays as $t^{-1}$ in the specified regime.

On vertex-transitive graphs, $(tP_t)^{-1}$ approximates the probability of non-collision before time $t$.

Convergence of $tP_t$ is proved for unimodular Galton-Watson trees as $t o ty$.

Abstract

In this paper we consider coalescing random walks on a general connected graph $G=(V,E)$. We set up a unified framework to study the leading order of the decay rate of $P_t$, the expectation of the fraction of occupied sites at time $t$, particularly for the `Big Bang' regime where $t\ll t_{\text{coal}}:=\mathbb{E}[\inf\{s:\text{There is only one particle at time }s\}]$. Our results show that $P_t$ satisfies certain mean field behavior, if the graphs satisfy certain transience-like conditions. We apply this framework to two families of graphs: (1) graphs given by the configuration model with a degree distribution supported in $[3,\bar d]$ for some $\bar d\geq 3$, and (2) finite and infinite vertex-transitive graphs. In the first case, we show that for $1 \ll t \ll |V|$, $P_t$ decays in the order of $t^{-1}$, and $(tP_t)^{-1}$ is approximately the probability that two particles starting from the root of the corresponding unimodular Galton-Watson tree never collide after one of them leaves the root, which is also roughly $|V|/(2t_{\text{meet}})$, where $t_{\text{meet}}$ is the mean meeting time of two walkers. By taking the local weak limit, for the unimodular Galton-Watson tree we prove the convergence of $tP_t$ as $t\to\infty$. For the second family of graphs, if we take a sequence of finite graphs $G_n=(V_n, E_n)$, such that $t_{\text{meet}}=O(|V_n|)$ and the inverse of the spectral gap $t_{\text{rel}}$ is $o(|V_n|)$, then for $t_{\text{rel}}\ll t\ll t_{\text{coal}}$, $(tP_t)^{-1}$ is approximately the probability that two random walks never meet before time $t$, and also $|V|/(2t_{\text{meet}})$. In addition, we define a natural uniform transience condition, and show that it implies the above for all $1\ll t\ll t_{\text{coal}}$. Such estimates of $tP_t$ are also obtained for all infinite transient transitive unimodular graphs, in particular, all transient transitive amenable graphs.