Trapping in the random conductance model

Series:
Stochastics Seminar
Thursday, February 16, 2012 - 15:05
1 hour (actually 50 minutes)
Location:
Skyles 006
,
UCLA
Organizer:
We consider random walks on Z^d among nearest-neighbor random conductances which are i.i.d., positive, bounded uniformly from above but which can be arbitrarily close to zero. Our focus is on the detailed properties of the paths of the random walk conditioned to return back to the starting point after time 2n. We show that in the situations when the heat kernel exhibits subdiffusive behavior --- which is known to be possible in dimensions d \geq 4-- the walk gets trapped for time of order n in a small spatial region. This proves that the strategy used to infer subdiffusive lower bounds on the heat kernel in earlier studies of this problem is in fact dominant. In addition, we settle a conjecture on the maximal possible subdiffusive decay in four dimensions and prove that anomalous decay is a tail and thus zero-one event. Joint work with Marek Biskup, Alexander Vandenberg and Alexander Rozinov.