Let $\mathcal{T}_n$ be the cover time of two-dimensional discrete torus $\mathbb{Z}^2_n=\mathbb{Z}^2/n\mathbb{Z}^2$. We prove that $\mathbb{P}[\mathcal{T}_n\leq \frac{4}{\pi}\gamma n^2\ln^2 n]=\exp(-n^{2(1-\sqrt{\gamma})+o(1)})$ for $\gamma\in (0,1)$. One of the main methods used in the proofs is the decoupling of the walker's trace into independent excursions by means of soft local times.Comment: 25 pages, 5 figure

Abstract. Spider walks are systems of interacting particles. The particles move independently as long as their movements do not violate some given rules describing the relative position of the particles; moves that violate the rules are not realized. The goal of this paper is to study qualitative properties, as recurrence, transience, ergodicity, and positive rate of escape of these Markov processes.

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We study a one-dimensional random walk among random conductances, with unbounded jumps. Assuming the ergodicity of the collection of conductances and a few other technical conditions (uniform ellipticity and polynomial bounds on the tails of the jumps) we prove a quenched uniform invariance principle for the random walk. This means that the rescaled trajectory of length n is (in a certain sense) close enough to the Brownian motion, uniformly with respect to the choice of the starting location in an interval of length O( √ n) around the origin.