The Parabolic Anderson Model And Long Range Percolation

Polymer chains that interact with themselves and/or their environment display a range of physical and chemical phenomena. This text focuses on the mathematical description of some of these phenomena, offering a mathematical panorama of polymer chains.

The Current Index to Statistics (CIS) is a bibliographic index of publications in statistics, probability, and related fields.

The theory of random graphs began in the late 1950s in several papers by Erdos and Renyi. In the late twentieth century, the notion of six degrees of separation, meaning that any two people on the planet can be connected by a short chain of people who know each other, inspired Strogatz and Watts to define the small world random graph in which each site is connected to k close neighbors, but also has long-range connections. At a similar time, it was observed in human social and sexual networks and on the Internet that the number of neighbors of an individual or computer has a power law distribution. This inspired Barabasi and Albert to define the preferential attachment model, which has these properties. These two papers have led to an explosion of research. The purpose of this book is to use a wide variety of mathematical argument to obtain insights into the properties of these graphs. A unique feature is the interest in the dynamics of process taking place on the graph in addition to their geometric properties, such as connectedness and diameter.

This is a comprehensive survey on the research on the parabolic Anderson model – the heat equation with random potential or the random walk in random potential – of the years 1990 – 2015. The investigation of this model requires a combination of tools from probability (large deviations, extreme-value theory, e.g.) and analysis (spectral theory for the Laplace operator with potential, variational analysis, e.g.). We explain the background, the applications, the questions and the connections with other models and formulate the most relevant results on the long-time behavior of the solution, like quenched and annealed asymptotics for the total mass, intermittency, confinement and concentration properties and mass flow. Furthermore, we explain the most successful proof methods and give a list of open research problems. Proofs are not detailed, but concisely outlined and commented; the formulations of some theorems are slightly simplified for better comprehension.

This is a volume in memory of Vladas Sidoravicius who passed away in 2019. Vladas has edited two volumes appeared in this series ("In and Out of Equilibrium") and is now honored by friends and colleagues with research papers reflecting Vladas' interests and contributions to probability theory.