Sampling biased monotonic surfaces using exponential metrics
Abstract Monotonic surfaces spanning finite regions of ℤ d arise in many contexts, including DNA-based self-assembly, card-shuffling and lozenge tilings. One method that has been used to uniformly generate these surfaces is a Markov chain that iteratively adds or removes a single cube below the surface during a step. We consider a biased version of the chain, where we are more likely to add a cube than to remove it, thereby favouring surfaces that are ‘higher’ or have more cubes below it. We prove that the chain is rapidly mixing for any uniform bias in ℤ 2 and for bias λ > d in ℤ d when d  > 2. In ℤ 2 we match the optimal mixing time achieved by Benjamini, Berger, Hoffman and Mossel in the context of biased card shuffling [2], but using much simpler arguments. The proofs use a geometric distance function and a variant of path coupling in order to handle distances that can be exponentially large. We also provide the first results in the case of fluctuating bias , where the bias can vary depending on the location of the tile. We show that the chain continues to be rapidly mixing if the biases are more »
Authors:
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Award ID(s):
Publication Date:
NSF-PAR ID:
10324726
Journal Name:
Combinatorics, Probability and Computing
Volume:
29
Issue:
5
Page Range or eLocation-ID:
672 to 697
ISSN:
0963-5483
1. Abstract We study and classify proper q -colourings of the ℤ d lattice, identifying three regimes where different combinatorial behaviour holds. (1) When $q\le d+1$ , there exist frozen colourings, that is, proper q -colourings of ℤ d which cannot be modified on any finite subset. (2) We prove a strong list-colouring property which implies that, when $q\ge d+2$ , any proper q -colouring of the boundary of a box of side length $n \ge d+2$ can be extended to a proper q -colouring of the entire box. (3) When $q\geq 2d+1$ , the latter holds for any $n \ge 1$ . Consequently, we classify the space of proper q -colourings of the ℤ d lattice by their mixing properties.