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EIGENVALUE VERSUS PERIMETER IN A SHAPE THEOREM FOR SELF-INTERACTING RANDOM WALKS

Publication |
2018

Abstract

We study paths of time-length t of a continuous-time random walk on Z(2) subject to self-interaction that depends on the geometry of the walk range and a collection of random, uniformly positive and finite edge weights. The interaction enters through a Gibbs weight at inverse temperature beta; the "energy" is the total sum of the edge weights for edges on the outer boundary of the range.

For edge weights sampled from a translation-invariant, ergodic law, we prove that the range boundary condensates around an asymptotic shape in the limit t -> infinity followed by beta -> infinity. The limit shape is a minimizer (unique, modulo translates) of the sum of the principal harmonic frequency of the domain and the perimeter with respect to the first-passage percolation norm derived from (the law of) the edge weights.

A dense subset of all norms in R-2, and thus a large variety of shapes, arise from the class of weight distributions to which our proofs apply.