Cycle structure of percolation on high-dimensional tori

Abstract: In the past years, many properties of the largest connected components of critical percolation on the high-dimensional torus, such as their sizes and diameter, have been established. The order of magnitude of these quantities equals the one for percolation on the complete graph or Erdos-Renyi random graph, raising the question whether the scaling limits of the largest connected components, as identified by Aldous (1997), are also equal. In this paper, we investigate the cycle structure of the largest critical components for high-dimensional percolation on the torus (Z/rZ)^d. While percolation clusters naturally have many short cycles, we show that the long cycles, i.e., cycles that pass through the boundary of the cube of width r/4 centered around each of their vertices, have length of order r^{d/3}, as on the critical Erdos-Renyi random graph. On the Erdos-Renyi random graph, cycles play an essential role in the scaling limit of the large critical clusters, as identified by Addario-Berry, Broutin and Goldschmidt (arXiv:0908.3629). Our proofs crucially rely on various new estimates of probabilities of the existence of open paths in critical Bernoulli percolation on Z^d with constraints on their lengths. We believe these estimates are interesting in their own right.