A law of large numbers for the range of rotor walks on periodic trees

The aim of the current work is to prove a law of large numbers for the range size of recurrent rotor walks with random initial configuration on a general class of trees, called periodic trees or directed covers of graphs.Comment: New references added; 21 pages, 1 figure. Appendix on rotor-recurrent trees that contain rotor-transient subtrees. arXiv admin note: text overlap with arXiv:1203.147

Range and speed of rotor walks on trees

We prove a law of large numbers for the range of rotor walks with random initial configuration on regular trees and on Galton-Watson trees. More precisely, we show that on the classes of trees under consideration, even in the case when the rotor walk is recurrent, the range grows at linear speed. We also show the existence of the speed for such rotor walks.Comment: Final version; accepted in Journal of Theoretical Probability 201

Random walks with local memory

We prove a quenched invariance principle for a class of random walks in random environment on $\mathbb{Z}^d$, where the walker alters its own environment. The environment consists of an outgoing edge from each vertex. The walker updates the edge $e$ at its current location to a new random edge $e'$ (whose law depends on $e$) and then steps to the other endpoint of $e'$. We show that a native environment for these walks (i.e., an environment that is stationary in time from the perspective of the walker) consists of the wired uniform spanning forest oriented toward the walker, plus an independent outgoing edge from the walker.Comment: 29 pages, 7 figure

Rotor walks on transient graphs and the wired spanning forest

We study rotor walks on transient graphs with initial rotor configuration sampled from the oriented wired uniform spanning forest (OWUSF) measure. We show that the expected number of visits to any vertex by the rotor walk is at most equal to the expected number of visits by the simple random walk. In particular, this implies that this walk is transient. When these two numbers coincide, we show that the rotor configuration at the end of the process also has the law of OWUSF. Furthermore, if the graph is vertex-transitive, we show that the average number of visits by $n$ consecutive rotor walks converges to the Green function of the simple random walk as $n$ tends to infinity. This answers a question posed by Florescu, Ganguly, Levine, and Peres (2014).Comment: 32 pages, 3 figure

A rotor configuration with maximum escape rate

Rotor walk is a deterministic analogue of simple random walk. For any given graph, we construct a rotor configuration for which the escape rate of the corresponding rotor walk is equal to the escape rate of simple random walk, and thus answer a question of Florescu, Ganguly, Levine, and Peres (2014).Comment: 6 page

Internal Aggregation Models on Comb Lattices

The two-dimensional comb lattice $C_2$ is a natural spanning tree of the Euclidean lattice $\mathbb{Z}^2$. We study three related cluster growth models on $C_2$: internal diffusion limited aggregation (IDLA), in which random walkers move on the vertices of $C_2$ until reaching an unoccupied site where they stop; rotor-router aggregation in which particles perform deterministic walks, and stop when reaching a site previously unoccupied; and the divisible sandpile model where at each vertex there is a pile of sand, for which, at each step, the mass exceeding 1 is distributed equally among the neighbours. We describe the shape of the divisible sandpile cluster on $C_2$, which is then used to give inner bounds for IDLA and rotor-router aggregation.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figure

Euler tours and unicycles in the rotor-router model

A recurrent state of the rotor-routing process on a finite sink-free graph can be represented by a unicycle that is a connected spanning subgraph containing a unique directed cycle. We distinguish between short cycles of length 2 called "dimers" and longer ones called "contours". Then the rotor-router walk performing an Euler tour on the graph generates a sequence of dimers and contours which exhibits both random and regular properties. Imposing initial conditions randomly chosen from the uniform distribution we calculate expected numbers of dimers and contours and correlation between them at two successive moments of time in the sequence. On the other hand, we prove that the excess of the number of contours over dimers is an invariant depending on planarity of the subgraph but not on initial conditions. In addition, we analyze the mean-square displacement of the rotor-router walker in the recurrent state.Comment: 17 pages, 4 figures. J. Stat. Mech. (2014

A Loop Reversibility and Subdiffusion of the Rotor-Router Walk

The rotor-router model on a graph describes a discrete-time walk accompanied by the deterministic evolution of configurations of rotors randomly placed on vertices of the graph. We prove the following property: if at some moment of time, the rotors form a closed clockwise contour on the planar graph, then the clockwise rotations of rotors generate a walk which enters into the contour at some vertex $v$, performs a number of steps inside the contour so that the contour formed by rotors becomes anti-clockwise, and then leaves the contour at the same vertex $v$. This property generalizes the previously proved theorem for the case when the rotor configuration inside the contour is a cycle-rooted spanning tree, and all rotors inside the contour perform a full rotation. We use the proven property for an analysis of the sub-diffusive behavior of the rotor-router walk.Comment: 15 pages, 5 figure

Discrete low-discrepancy sequences

Holroyd and Propp used Hall's marriage theorem to show that, given a probability distribution pi on a finite set S, there exists an infinite sequence s_1,s_2,... in S such that for all integers k >= 1 and all s in S, the number of i in [1,k] with s_i = s differs from k pi(s) by at most 1. We prove a generalization of this result using a simple explicit algorithm. A special case of this algorithm yields an extension of Holroyd and Propp's result to the case of discrete probability distributions on infinite sets.Comment: Since posting the preprint, we have learned that our main result was proved by Tijdeman in the 1970s and that his proof is the same as our

Rotor-Router Aggregation on the Comb

We prove a shape theorem for rotor-router aggregation on the comb, for a specific initial rotor configuration and clockwise rotor sequence for all vertices. Furthermore, as an application of rotor-router walks, we describe the harmonic measure of the rotor-router aggregate and related shapes, which is useful in the study of other growth models on the comb. We also identify the shape for which the harmonic measure is uniform. This gives the first known example where the rotor-router cluster has non-uniform harmonic measure, and grows with different speeds in different directions.Comment: 23 pages, 4 figure