Random Walks On Disordered Media And Their Scaling Limits

Random Walks on Disordered Media and their Scaling Limits

In these lecture notes, we will analyze the behavior of random walk on disordered media by means of both probabilistic and analytic methods, and will study the scaling limits. We will focus on the discrete potential theory and how the theory is effectively used in the analysis of disordered media. The first few chapters of the notes can be used as an introduction to discrete potential theory. Recently, there has been significant progress on the theory of random walk on disordered media such as fractals and random media. Random walk on a percolation cluster(‘the ant in the labyrinth’)is one of the typical examples. In 1986, H. Kesten showed the anomalous behavior of a random walk on a percolation cluster at critical probability. Partly motivated by this work, analysis and diffusion processes on fractals have been developed since the late eighties. As a result, various new methods have been produced to estimate heat kernels on disordered media. These developments are summarized in the notes.

Random Walks on Disordered Media and Their Scaling Limits

Probability and Statistical Physics in St. Petersburg

This book brings a reader to the cutting edge of several important directions of the contemporary probability theory, which in many cases are strongly motivated by problems in statistical physics. The authors of these articles are leading experts in the field and the reader will get an exceptional panorama of the field from the point of view of scientists who played, and continue to play, a pivotal role in the development of the new methods and ideas, interlinking it with geometry, complex analysis, conformal field theory, etc., making modern probability one of the most vibrant areas in mathematics.