Lower bounds for boundary roughness for droplets in Bernoulli percolation

Abstract

We consider boundary roughness for the ``droplet'' created when supercritical two-dimensional Bernoulli percolation is conditioned to have an open dual circuit surrounding the origin and enclosing an area at least $l^2$, for large $l$. The maximum local roughness is the maximum inward deviation of the droplet boundary from the boundary of its own convex hull; we show that for large $l$ this maximum is at least of order $l^{1/3}(\log l{)}^{-2/3}$. This complements the upper bound of order $l^{1/3}(\log l{)}^{2/3}$ known for the average local roughness. The exponent 1/3 on $l$ here is in keeping with predictions from the physics literature for interfaces in two dimensions.

28 pages, 1 figure (.eps file). See also http://math.usc.edu/~alexandr/