Polluted Bootstrap Percolation in Three Dimensions

Janko Gravner, Alexander E. Holroyd, David Sivakoff

Published 2017-06-22Version 1

In the polluted bootstrap percolation model, vertices of the cubic lattice $\mathbb{Z}^3$ are independently declared initially occupied with probability $p$ or closed with probability $q$. Under the standard (respectively, modified) bootstrap rule, a vertex becomes occupied at a subsequent step if it is not closed and it has at least $3$ occupied neighbors (respectively, an occupied neighbor in each coordinate). We study the final density of occupied vertices as $p,q\to 0$. We show that this density converges to $1$ if $q \ll p^3(\log p^{-1})^{-3}$ for both standard and modified rules. Our principal result is a complementary bound with a matching power for the modified model: there exists $C$ such that the final density converges to $0$ if $q > Cp^3$. For the standard model, we establish convergence to $0$ under the stronger condition $q>Cp^2$.