Explosive Percolation: Unusual Transitions of a Simple Model

In this paper we review the recent advances on explosive percolation, a very sharp phase transition first observed by Achlioptas et al. (Science, 2009). There a simple model was proposed, which changed slightly the classical percolation process so that the emergence of the spanning cluster is delayed. This slight modification turns out to have a great impact on the percolation phase transition. The resulting transition is so sharp that it was termed explosive, and it was at first considered to be discontinuous. This surprising fact stimulated considerable interest in "Achlioptas processes". Later work, however, showed that the transition is continuous (at least for Achlioptas processes on Erdos networks), but with very unusual finite size scaling. We present a review of the field, indicate open "problems" and propose directions for future research.Comment: 27 pages, 4 figures, Review pape

Explosive Percolation in the Human Protein Homology Network

We study the explosive character of the percolation transition in a real-world network. We show that the emergence of a spanning cluster in the Human Protein Homology Network (H-PHN) exhibits similar features to an Achlioptas-type process and is markedly different from regular random percolation. The underlying mechanism of this transition can be described by slow-growing clusters that remain isolated until the later stages of the process, when the addition of a small number of links leads to the rapid interconnection of these modules into a giant cluster. Our results indicate that the evolutionary-based process that shapes the topology of the H-PHN through duplication-divergence events may occur in sudden steps, similarly to what is seen in first-order phase transitions.Comment: 13 pages, 6 figure

Ordinary Percolation with Discontinuous Transitions

Percolation on a one-dimensional lattice and fractals such as the Sierpinski gasket is typically considered to be trivial because they percolate only at full bond density. By dressing up such lattices with small-world bonds, a novel percolation transition with explosive cluster growth can emerge at a nontrivial critical point. There, the usual order parameter, describing the probability of any node to be part of the largest cluster, jumps instantly to a finite value. Here, we provide a simple example of this transition in form of a small-world network consisting of a one-dimensional lattice combined with a hierarchy of long-range bonds that reveals many features of the transition in a mathematically rigorous manner.Comment: RevTex, 5 pages, 4 eps-figs, and Mathematica Notebook as Supplement included. Final version, with several corrections and improvements. For related work, see http://www.physics.emory.edu/faculty/boettcher