Scaling Limit and Critical Exponents for Two-Dimensional Bootstrap Percolation

Abstract

Consider a cellular automaton with state space {0,1} ℤ2 where the initial configuration ω_0 is chosen according to a Bernoulli product measure, 1’s are stable, and 0’s become 1’s if they are surrounded by at least three neighboring 1’s. In this paper we show that the configuration ω_n at time n converges exponentially fast to a final configuration $$\bar\omega$$ , and that the limiting measure corresponding to $$\bar\omega$$ is in the universality class of Bernoulli (independent) percolation. More precisely, assuming the existence of the critical exponents β, η, ν and γ, and of the continuum scaling limit of crossing probabilities for independent site percolation on the close-packed version of ℤ2 (i.e. for independent *-percolation on ℤ), we prove that the bootstrapped percolation model has the same scaling limit and critical exponents.This type of bootstrap percolation can be seen as a paradigm for a class of cellular automata whose evolution is given, at each time step, by a monotonic and nonessential enhancement [Aizenman and Grimmett, J. Stat. Phys. 63: 817--835 (1991); Grimmett, Percolation, 2nd Ed. (Springer, Berlin, 1999)