First passage percolation and escape strategies

Abstract

Consider first passage percolation on ${\mathbb{Z}}^d$ with passage times given by i.i.d. random variables with common distribution $F$. Let $t_{\pi }(u,v)$ be the time from $u$ to $v$ for a path $\pi$ and $t(u,v)$ the minimal time among all paths from $u$ to $v$. We ask whether or not there exist points $x,y\in {\mathbb{Z}}^d$ and a semi-infinite path $\pi =(y_0=y,y_1,\dots )$ such that $t_{\pi }(y,y_{n+1})<t(x,y_n)$ for all $n$. Necessary and sufficient conditions on $F$ are given for this to occur. When the support of $F$ is unbounded, we also obtain results on the number of edges with large passage time used by geodesics.