Spouge's Conjecture on Complete and Instantaneous Gelation

We investigate the stochastic counterpart of the Smoluchowski coagulation equation, namely the Marcus–Lushnikov coagulation model. It is believed that for a broad class of kernels, all particles are swept into one huge cluster in an arbitrarily small time, which is known as a complete and instantaneous gelation phenomenon. Indeed, Spouge (also Domilovskii et al. for a special case) conjectured that K(i, j)=(ij), >1, are such kernels. In this paper, we extend the above conjecture and prove rigorously that if there is a function (i, j), increasing in both i and j such that _j=1 1/(j(i, j))< for all i, and K(i, j)ij(i, j) for all i, j, then complete and instantaneous gelation occurs. Evidently, this implies that any kernels K(i, j)ij(log(i+1)log(j+1)), >1, exhibit complete instantaneous gelation. Also, we conjuncture the existence of a critical (or metastable) sol state: if lim_i+jij/K(i, j)=0 and _{i, j=1} 1/K(i, j)=, then gelation time T_g satisfies 0<T_g<. Moreover, the gelation is complete after T_g.