Two-dimensional forest fires with boundary ignitions

TL;DR

This paper investigates boundary-driven forest fire models on lattices, proving that the probability of the center burning tends to zero in large boxes and that no infinite cluster forms in the half-plane, providing insights into related models.

Contribution

It introduces and analyzes a boundary ignition variant of the forest fire process, establishing asymptotic behaviors and non-existence of infinite clusters in large or half-plane settings.

Findings

Probability of center burning tends to zero as size increases

No infinite occupied cluster in the half-plane model

Insights applicable to models with recoveries

Abstract

In the classical Drossel-Schwabl forest fire process, vertices of a lattice become occupied at rate $1$, and they are hit by lightning at some tiny rate $\zeta > 0$, which causes entire connected components to burn. In this paper, we study a variant where fires are coming from the boundary of the forest instead. In particular we prove that, for the case without recoveries where the forest is an $N \times N$ box in the triangular lattice, the probability that the center of the box gets burnt tends to $0$ as $N \rightarrow \infty$ (but substantially slower than the one-arm probability of critical Bernoulli percolation). And, for the case where the forest is the upper-half plane, we show (still for the version without recoveries) that no infinite occupied cluster emerges. We also discuss analogs of some of these results for the corresponding models with recoveries, and explain how our results and proofs give valuable insight on a process considered earlier by Graf.