Issue |
EPL
Volume 100, Number 6, December 2012
|
|
---|---|---|
Article Number | 66006 | |
Number of page(s) | 6 | |
Section | Condensed Matter: Structural, Mechanical and Thermal Properties | |
DOI | https://doi.org/10.1209/0295-5075/100/66006 | |
Published online | 08 January 2013 |
Deriving an underlying mechanism for discontinuous percolation
1 School of Mathematical Sciences, Peking University - No. 5 Yiheyuan Road, Haidian, Beijing 100871, China
2 Institute of Computing Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences - No. 6 KeXueYuanNanLu, Haidian, Beijing 100190, China
3 University of California - One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616, USA
4 Beihang University - No. 37 Xueyuan Road, Haidian, Beijing 100191, China
5 Santa Fe Institute - 1399 Hyde Park Road, Santa Fe, NM 87501, USA
Received: 8 September 2012
Accepted: 27 November 2012
Understanding what types of phenomena lead to discontinuous phase transitions in the connectivity of random networks is an outstanding challenge. Here we show that a simple stochastic model of graph evolution leads to a discontinuous percolation transition and we derive the underlying mechanism responsible: growth by overtaking. Starting from a collection of n isolated nodes, potential edges chosen uniformly at random from the complete graph are examined one at a time while a cap, k, on the maximum allowed component size is enforced. Edges whose addition would exceed k can be simply rejected provided the accepted fraction of edges never becomes smaller than a function which decreases with k as g(k) = 1/2 + (2k)−β. We show that if β < 1 it is always possible to reject a sampled edge and the growth in the largest component is dominated by an overtaking mechanism leading to a discontinuous transition. If β > 1, once k ⩾ n1/β, there are situations when a sampled edge must be accepted leading to direct growth dominated by stochastic fluctuations and a “weakly” discontinuous transition. We also show that the distribution of component sizes and the evolution of component sizes are distinct from those previously observed and show no finite-size effects for the range of β studied.
PACS: 64.60.ah – Percolation / 64.60.aq – Networks / 05.70.Ln – Nonequilibrium and irreversible thermodynamics
© EPLA, 2012
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