Percolation

Percolation is the phenomenon of transport of a fluid through a porous medium. For example, oil or gas through rock, or water through coffee powder. The medium consists of microscopic pores and channels through which the fluid might pass. In a simple situation, each channel will be open or closed to the passage of the fluid, depending on several characteristics of the medium which could be summed up in a few parameters. The distribution of open and closed channels could be described probabilistically. In the simplest case, each channel, independently of the others, is open with probability p, the single parameter of the model, and closed with probability 1 - p. We will model the medium microscopically by the d-dimensional hipercubic lattice, Zd, whose sites and (nearest neighbor) bonds represent the pores and channels, respectively. This constitutes what we will call the independent (Bernoulli) bond percolation model (in Zd). It will be focused on in Part I of these notes. A basic question is the occurrence or not of percolation, that is, the existence of an infinite path, through open bonds only, cutting through the medium. In the next sections of this introduction, we will define the model in detail and show its first non-trivial result, establishing the existence of a phase transition in 2 and higher dimensions, that is, establishing the existence of a critical value for the parameter p, pc is an element of (0, 1), such that the model does not exhibit percolation almost surely for values of p below pc, and does exhibit percolation almost surely for values of p above pc. In Part II, we consider an oriented percolation model in a random environment which is related to several interesting questions in discrete probability. In Part III, we depart further from the initial model, and consider stochastic Ising models at zero temperature, which are not immediately related to the models in the previous parts, but rather to a dynamical percolation model called bootstrap percolation