Percolation

Quite apart from the fact that percolation theory had its ongm in an honest applied problem, it is a source of fascinating problems of the best kind for which a mathematician can wish: problems which are easy to state with a minimum of preparation, but whose solutions are apparently difficult and require new methods. At the same time, many of the prob­ lems are of interest to or proposed by statistical physicists and not dreamed up merely to demonstrate ingenuity. Much progress has been made in recent years, and many of the open problems of ten years aga have been solved. With such solutions we have seen the evolution of new techniques and questions; the consequent knowledge has shifted the ground under percolation, and it is time to examine afresh the mathematics of the subject. The quantity of literature related to percolation seems to grow hour by hour, mostly in the physics journals. It is becoming increasingly diffi­ cult to get to know the subject from scratch, and one of the principal purposes of this book is to remedy this. This book is about the mathematics of percolation theory, with the emphasis upon presenting the shortest rigorous proofs of the main facts. The mathematical theory of percolation has acquired something of a reputation for inaccessibility. In addition, several recent advances of substance have tossed the historical order of discovery on its head. It is time to re-examine the subject afresh, in light of recent discoveries. This book does just that. It contains a definitive and coherent account of the subject, in an orderly way accessible to the non-specialist, including the shortest and neatest proofs currently known. In order to maximize accessibility, it concentrates on bond percolation on the d-dimensional cubic lattice where d>2. The subcritical and supercritical phases are described in considerable detail; the recent proofs of the uniqueness of critical points and the infinite open cluster are used extensively. There are two chapters devoted to a lucid account of the physical theory of scaling the renormalization in the context of percolation. There is a chapter dealing with the case of two dimensions, including a rather short proof of the famous exact calculation of + for the critical probability. The book terminates with a collection of pencil sketches of related areas of mathematics and physics. Front Matter....Pages i-xi What Is Percolation?....Pages 1-24 Some Basic Techniques....Pages 25-43 The Uniqueness of the Critical Point....Pages 44-71 The Number of Open Clusters per Vertex....Pages 72-81 The Subcritical Phase....Pages 82-108 The Supercritical Phase....Pages 109-147 Near the Critical Point: Scaling Theory....Pages 148-168 Near the Critical Point: Rigorous Results....Pages 169-185 Bond Percolation in Two Dimensions....Pages 186-235 A Miscellany of Random Processes....Pages 236-265 Back Matter....Pages 266-296