We study an interacting system of competing particles on the real line. Two populations of positive and negative particles evolve according to branching Brownian motion. When opposing particles meet, their charges neutralize and the particles annihilate, as in an inert chemical reaction. We show that, with positive probability, the two populations coexist and that, on this event, the interface is asymptotically linear with a random slope. A variety of generalizations and open problems are discussed.

We study the transition from stability to chaos in a dynamic last passage percolation model on  with random weights at the vertices. Given an initial weight configuration at time 0, we perturb the model over time in such a way that the weight configuration at time t is obtained by resampling each weight independently with probability t. On the cube [0, ^n]d, we study geodesics, that is, weight-maximizing up-right paths from (0,0,⋯,0) to (n,n,⋯,n), and their passage time T. Under mild conditions on the weight distribution, we prove a phase transition between stability and chaos at t≍ Var(T). Indeed, as n grows large, for small values of t, the passage times at time 0 and time t are highly correlated, while for large values of t, the geodesics become almost disjoint.

We study a system of interacting urns where balls of different colour/type compete for their survival, and annihilate upon contact. For competition between two types, the underlying graph (finite and connected), determining the interaction between the urns, is known to be irrelevant for the possibility of coexistence, whereas for K ≥ 3 types the structure of the graph does affect the possibility of coexistence. We show that when the underlying graph is a cycle, competition between K ≥ 3 types almost surely has a single survivor, thus establishing a conjecture of Griffiths, Janson, Morris and the first author. Along the way, we give a detailed description of an auto-annihilative process on the cycle, which can be perceived as an expression of the geometry of a Möbius strip in a discrete setting.

We study a model of competition between two types evolving as branching random walks on Z(d). The two types are represented by red and blue balls, respectively, with the rule that balls of different colour annihilate upon contact. We consider initial configurations in which the sites of Z(d) contain one ball each which are independently coloured red with probability p and blue otherwise. We address the question of fixation, referring to the sites and eventually settling for a given colour or not. Under a mild moment condition on the branching rule, we prove that the process will fixate almost surely for p not equal 1/2 and that every site will change colour infinitely often almost surely for the balanced initial condition p = 1/2.

We consider planar first-passage percolation and show that the time constant can be bounded by multiples of the first and second tertiles of the weight distribution. As a consequence, we obtain a counter-example to a problem proposed by Alm and Deijfen (2015).

The two-type Richardson model describes the growth of two competing infection types on the two or higher dimensional integer lattice. For types that spread with the same intensity, it is known that there is a positive probability for infinite coexistence, while for types with different intensities, it is conjectured that infinite coexistence is not possible. In this paper we study the two-type Richardson model in the upper half-plane Z x Z(+), and prove that coexistence of two types starting on the horizontal axis has positive probability if and only if the types have the same intensity.

We study the rate of convergence in the celebrated Shape Theorem in first-passage percolation, obtaining the precise asymptotic rate of decay for the probability of linear order deviations under a moment condition. Our results are presented from a temporal perspective and complement previous work by the same author, in which the rate of convergence was studied from the standard spatial perspective.

We study the growth of two competing infection types on graphs generated by the configuration model with a given degree sequence. Starting from two vertices chosen uniformly at random, the infection types spread via the edges in the graph in that an uninfected vertex becomes type 1 (2) infected at rate lambda(1) (lambda(2)) times the number of nearest neighbors of type 1 (2). Assuming (essentially) that the degree of a randomly chosen vertex has finite second moment, we show that if lambda(1) = lambda(2), then the fraction of vertices that are ultimately infected by type 1 converges to a continuous random variable V is an element of (0,1), as the number of vertices tends to infinity. Both infection types hence occupy a positive (random) fraction of the vertices. If lambda(1) not equal lambda(2), on the other hand, then the type with the larger intensity occupies all but a vanishing fraction of the vertices. Our results apply also to a uniformly chosen simple graph with the given degree sequence.

We study survival among two competing types in two settings: a planar growth model related to two-neighbor bootstrap percolation, and a system of urns with graph-based interactions. In the planar growth model, uncolored sites are given a color at rate 0, 1 or infinity, depending on whether they have zero, one, or at least two neighbors of that color. In the urn scheme, each vertex of a graph G has an associated urn containing some number of either blue or red balls ( but not both). At each time step, a ball is chosen uniformly at random from all those currently present in the system, a ball of the same color is added to each neighboring urn, and balls in the same urn but of different colors annihilate on a one-for-one basis. We show that, for every connected graph G and every initial configuration, only one color survives almost surely. As a corollary, we deduce that in the two-type growth model on Z(2), one of the colors only infects a finite number of sites with probability one. We also discuss generalizations to higher dimensions and multi-type processes, and list a number of open problems and conjectures.

We consider the Poisson Boolean percolation model in R-2, where the radius of each ball is independently chosen according to some probability measure with finite second moment. For this model, we show that the two thresholds, for the existence of an unbounded occupied and an unbounded vacant component, coincide. This complements a recent study of the sharpness of the phase transition in Poisson Boolean percolation by the same authors. As a corollary it follows that for Poisson Boolean percolation in R-d, for any d >= 2, finite moment of order d is both necessary and sufficient for the existence of a nontrivial phase transition for the vacant set.