Georgia Institute of Technology College of Sciences

In two-dimensional critical percolation, the work of Aizenman-Burchard implies that macroscopic distances inside percolation clusters are bounded below by a power of the Euclidean distance greater than 1+\epsilon, for some positive \epsilon. No more precise lower bound has been given so far. Conditioned on the existence of an open crossing of a box of side length n, there is a distinguished open path which can be characterized in terms of arm exponents: the lowest open path crossing the box. This clearly gives an upper bound for the shortest path. The lowest crossing was shown by Morrow and Zhang to have volume n^4/3 on the triangular lattice. In 1992, Kesten and Zhang asked how, given the existence of an open crossing, the length of the shortest open crossing compares to that of the lowest; in particular, whether the ratio of these lengths tends to zero in probability. We answer this question positively.

For a nonnegative random variable Y with finite nonzero mean \mu, we say that Y^s has the Y-size bias distribution if E[Yf(Y)] = \mu E[f(Y^s)] for all bounded, measurable f. If Y can be coupled to Y^s having the Y-size bias distribution such that for some constant C we have Y^s \leq Y + C, then Y satisfies a 'Poisson tail' concentration of measure inequality. This yields concentration results for examples including urn occupancy statistics for multinomial allocation models and Germ-Grain models in stochastic geometry, which are members of a class of models with log concave marginals for which size bias couplings may be constructed more generally. Similarly, concentration bounds can be shown when one can construct a bounded zero bias coupling or a Stein pair for a mean zero random variable Y. These latter couplings can be used to demonstrate concentration in Hoeffding's permutation and doubly indexed permutations statistics. The bounds produced, which have their origin in Stein's method, offer improvements over those obtained by using other methods available in the literature. This work is joint with J. Bartroff, S. Ghosh and L. Goldstein.

Motivated by understanding the intricate combinatorial structure of the Poisson chaos in order to see whether or not a fourth moment type theorem may hold on that space, we define, construct and study the free Poisson chaos, a non-commutative counterpart of the classical Poisson space, on which we prove the free counter part of the fourth moment theorem. This is joint work with Giovanni Peccati.