Discrete threshold growth dynamics are omnivorous for box neighborhoods
Authors:
Tom Bohman
Affiliation:
Department of Mathematics, Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey 08903
Abstract:
In the discrete threshold model for crystal growth in the plane we begin with some set of seed crystals and observe crystal growth over time by generating a sequence of subsets of by a deterministic rule. This rule is as follows: a site crystallizes when a threshold number of crystallized points appear in the site's prescribed neighborhood. The growth dynamics generated by this model are said to be omnivorous if finite and imply . In this paper we prove that the dynamics are omnivorous when the neighborhood is a box (i.e. when, for some fixed , the neighborhood of is . This result has important implications in the study of the first passage time when is chosen randomly with a sparse Bernoulli density and in the study of the limiting shape to which converges.