Average site perimeter of directed animals on the two-dimensional lattices

We introduce new combinatorial (bijective) methods that enable us to compute the average value of three parameters of directed animals of a given area, including the site perimeter. Our results cover directed animals of any one-line source on the square lattice and its bounded variants, and we give counterparts for most of them in the triangular lattices. We thus prove conjectures by Conway and Le Borgne. The techniques used are based on Viennot's correspondence between directed animals and heaps of pieces (or elements of a partially commutative monoid)

Directed animals, quadratic and rewriting systems

A directed animal is a percolation cluster in the directed site percolation model. The aim of this paper is to exhibit a strong relation between the problem of computing the generating function \G of directed animals on the square lattice, counted according to the area and the perimeter, and the problem of solving a system of quadratic equations involving unknown matrices. We present some solid evidence that some infinite explicit matrices, the fixed points of a rewriting like system are the natural solutions to this system of equations: some strong evidence is given that the problem of finding \G reduces to the problem of finding an eigenvector to an explicit infinite matrix. Similar properties are shown for other combinatorial questions concerning directed animals, and for different lattices.Comment: 27 page

The local limit of rooted directed animals on the square lattice

We consider the local limit of finite uniformly distributed directed animals on the square lattice viewed from the root. Two constructions of the resulting uniform infinite directed animal are given: one as a heap of dominoes, constructed by letting gravity act on a right-continuous random walk and one as a Markov process, obtained by slicing the animal horizontally. We look at geometric properties of this local limit and prove, in particular, that it consists of a single vertex at infinitely many (random) levels. Several martingales are found in connection with the confinement of the infinite directed animal on the non-negative coordinates.Comment: 59 pages, 16 figure