The Metastability Threshold for Modified Bootstrap Percolation in d Dimensions

Alexander E. Holroyd

Published 2006-03-28, updated 2006-04-03Version 2

In the modified bootstrap percolation model, sites in the cube {1,...,L}^d are initially declared active independently with probability p. At subsequent steps, an inactive site becomes active if it has at least one active nearest neighbour in each of the d dimensions, while an active site remains active forever. We study the probability that the entire cube is eventually active. For all d>=2 we prove that as L\to\infty and p\to 0 simultaneously, this probability converges to 1 if L=exp^{d-1} (lambda+epsilon)/p, and converges to 0 if L=exp^{d-1} (lambda-epsilon)/p, for any epsilon>0. Here exp^n denotes the n-th iterate of the exponential function, and the threshold lambda equals pi^2/6 for all d.