We give a counterexample to a conjecture of Hammersley and Welsh (1965) about the convexity of the time constant in first-passage percolation, as a functional on the space of distribution functions. The present counterexample only works for first-passage percolation on…

This work was motivated by the recent work by H. Dette, J. Pitman and W.J. Studden on a new duality relation for random walks. In this note we consider the diffusion process limit of their result, and use the alternative…

The law for the time $\tau_{a}$ spent by a standard Brownian excursion above a given level $a > 0$ is found using Ito excursion theory. This is achieved by conditioning the excursion to have exactly one mark of an independent…

We investigate dual mechanisms for interacting particle systems. Generalizing an approach of Alkemper and Hutzenthaler in the case of coalescing duals, we show that a simple linear transformation leads to a moment duality of suitably rescaled processes. More precisely, we…

Consider critical bond percolation on a large $2 n \times 2 n$ box on the square lattice. It is well-known that the size (i.e. number of vertices) of the largest open cluster is, with high probability, of order $n^2 \pi(n)$, where $\pi(n)$ denotes…