This is the second, and last paper in which we address the behavior of oriented first passage percolation on the hypercube in the limit of large dimensions. We prove here that the extremal process converges to a Cox process with exponential intensity. This entails, in particular, that the first passage time converges weakly to a random shift of the Gumbel distribution. The random shift, which has an explicit, universal distribution related to modified Bessel functions of the second kind, is the sole manifestation of correlations ensuing from the geometry of Euclidean space in infinite dimensions. The proof combines the multiscale refinement of the second moment method with a conditional version of the Chen-Stein bounds, and a contraction principle.
We consider the problem of undirected polymers (tied at the endpoints) in random environment, also known as the unoriented first passage percolation on the hypercube, in the limit of large dimensions. By means of the multiscale refinement of the second moment method we obtain a fairly precise geometrical description of optimal paths, i.e. of polymers with minimal energy. The picture which emerges can be loosely summarized as follows. The energy of the polymer is, to first approximation, uniformly spread along the strand. The polymer's bonds carry however a lower energy than in the directed setting, and are reached through the following geometrical evolution. Close to the origin, the polymer proceeds in oriented fashion -it is thus as stretched as possible. The tension of the strand decreases however gradually, with the polymer allowing for more and more backsteps as it enters the core of the hypercube. Backsteps, although increasing the length of the strand, allow the polymer to connect reservoirs of energetically favorable edges which are otherwise unattainable in a fully directed regime. These reservoirs lie at mesoscopic distance apart, but in virtue of the high dimensional nature of the ambient space, the polymer manages to connect them through approximate geodesics with respect to the Hamming metric: this is the key strategy which leads to an optimal energy/entropy balance. Around halfway, the mirror picture sets in: the polymer tension gradually builds up again, until full orientedness close to the endpoint. The approach yields, as a corollary, a constructive proof of the result by Martinsson [Ann. Appl. Prob. 26 (2016), Ann. Prob. 46 (2018] concerning the leading order of the ground state.
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