Lower bounds for fluctuations in first-passage percolation for general distributions

Abstract: In first-passage percolation (FPP), one assigns i.i.d.~weights to the edges of the cubic lattice $\mathbb{Z}^d$ and analyzes the induced weighted graph metric. If $T(x,y)$ is the distance between vertices $x$ and $y$, then a primary question in the model is: what is the order of the fluctuations of $T(0,x)$? It is expected that the variance of $T(0,x)$ grows like the norm of $x$ to a power strictly less than 1, but the best lower bounds available are (only in two dimensions) of order $\log |x|$. This result was found in the '90s and there has not been any improvement since. In this paper, we address the problem of getting stronger fluctuation bounds: to show that $T(0,x)$ is with high probability not contained in an interval of size $o(\log |x|)^{1/2}$, and similar statements for FPP in thin cylinders. Such statements have been proved for special edge-weight distributions, and here we obtain such bounds for general edge-weight distributions. The methods involve inducing a fluctuation in the number of edges in a box whose weights are of "hi-mode" (large).