A tale of two balloons

Omer Angel, Gourab Ray, Yinon Spinka

Published 2021-03-11Version 1

From each point of a Poisson point process start growing a balloon at rate 1. When two balloons touch, they pop and disappear. Is every point contained in balloons infinitely often or not? We answer this for the Euclidean space, the hyperbolic plane and regular trees. The result for the Euclidean space relies on a novel 0-1 law for stationary processes. Towards establishing the results for the hyperbolic plane and regular trees, we prove an upper bound on the density of any well-separated set in a regular tree which is a factor of an i.i.d. process.