We prove a Large Deviations Principle for the number of intersections of two independent infinite-time ranges in dimension five and more, improving upon the moment bounds of Khanin, Mazel, Shlosman and Sina{i} [KMSS94]. This settles, in the discrete setting, a conjecture of van den Berg, Bolthausen and den Hollander [BBH04], who analyzed this question for the Wiener sausage in finite-time horizon. The proof builds on their result (which was resumed in the discrete setting by Phetpradap [Phet12]), and combines it with a series of tools that were developed in recent works of the authors [AS17, AS19a, AS20]. Moreover, we show that most of the intersection occurs in a single box where both walks realize an occupation density of order one.
We prove that in any finite set of $mathbb Z^d$ with $dge 3$, there is a subset whose capacity and volume are both of the same order as the capacity of the initial set. As an application we obtain estimates on the probability of {it covering uniformly} a finite set, and characterize some {it folding} events, under optimal hypotheses. For instance, knowing that a region of space has an {it atypically high occupation density} by some random walk, we show that this random region is most likely ball-like
We consider the extinction time of the contact process on increasing sequences of finite graphs obtained from a variety of random graph models. Under the assumption that the infection rate is above the critical value for the process on the integer line, in each case we prove that the logarithm of the extinction time divided by the size of the graph converges in probability to a (model-dependent) positive constant. The graphs we treat include various percolation models on increasing boxes of Z d or R d in their supercritical or percolative regimes (Bernoulli bond and site percolation, the occupied and vacant sets of random interlacements, excursion sets of the Gaussian free field, random geometric graphs) as well as supercritical Galton-Watson trees grown up to finite generations.
We study a natural continuous time version of excited random walks, introduced by Norris, Rogers and Williams about twenty years ago. We obtain a necessary and sufficient condition for recurrence and for positive speed. This is analogous to results for excited (or cookie) random walks.
