Competitive erosion is conformally invariant

  • Shirshendu Ganguly | University of Washington

We study a graph-theoretic model of interface dynamics called competitive erosion. Each vertex of the graph is occupied by a particle, which can be either red or blue. New red and blue particles are emitted alternately from their respective sources and perform random walk. On encountering a particle of the opposite color they remove it and occupy its position. This is a finite competitive version of the celebrated Internal DLA growth model. We establish conformal invariance of competitive erosion on discretizations of smooth planar simply connected domains. This is done by showing that at stationarity, with high probability the blue and the red regions are separated by an orthogonal circular arc on the disc and more generally by a hyperbolic geodesic. The talk will be based on joint works with Lionel Levine, Yuval Peres and James Propp.

Speaker Details

Shirshendu Ganguly is a PhD student at University of Washington, advised by Ioana Dumitriu and Christopher Hoffman. His research interests include Markov chains, competing particle systems, geometric and spectral properties of random graphs etc. For details see http://www.math.washington.edu/~sganguly/

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Series: Microsoft Research Talks