We celebrate the 50th anniversary of one the most classical models in probability theory. In this survey, we describe the main results of first passage percolation, paying special attention to the recent burst of advances of the past 5 years. The purpose of these notes is twofold. In the first chapters, we give self-contained proofs of seminal results obtained in the '80s and '90s on limit shapes and geodesics, while covering the state of the art of these questions. Second, aside from these classical results, we discuss recent perspectives and directions including (1) the connection between Busemann functions and geodesics, (2) the proof of sublinear variance under 2 + log moments of passage times and (3) the role of growth and competition models. We also provide a collection of (old and new) open questions, hoping to solve them before the 100th birthday.

We study first-passage percolation on Z 2 , where the edge weights are given by a translation-ergodic distribution, addressing questions related to existence and coalescence of infinite geodesics. Some of these were studied in the late 90's by C. Newman and collaborators under strong assumptions on the limiting shape and weight distribution. In this paper we develop a framework for working with distributional limits of Busemann functions and use it to prove forms of Newman's results under minimal assumptions. For instance, we show a form of coalescence of long finite geodesics in any deterministic direction. We also introduce a purely directional condition which replaces Newman's global curvature condition and whose assumption we show implies the existence of directional geodesics. Without this condition, we prove existence of infinite geodesics which are directed in sectors. Last, we analyze distributional limits of geodesic graphs, proving almost-sure coalescence and nonexistence of infinite backward paths. This result relates to the conjecture of nonexistence of "bigeodesics."Contents * M. D.

We prove that the variance of the passage time from the origin to a point x in first-passage percolation on Z d is sublinear in the distance to x when d ≥ 2, obeying the bound C x / log x , under minimal assumptions on the edge-weight distribution. The proof applies equally to absolutely continuous, discrete and singular continuous distributions and mixtures thereof, and requires only 2+log moments. The main result extends work of Benjamini-Kalai-Schramm [4] and Benaim-Rossignol [6].

No abstract

In first-passage percolation, we place i.i.d. continuous weights at the edges of Z 2 and consider the weighted graph metric. A distance-minimizing path between points x and y is called a geodesic, and a bigeodesic is a doubly-infinite path whose segments are geodesics. It is a famous conjecture that almost surely, there are no bigeodesics. In the '90s, Licea-Newman showed that, under a curvature assumption on the "asymptotic shape," all infinite geodesics have an asymptotic direction, and there is a full measure set D ⊂ [0, 2π) such that for any θ ∈ D, there are no bigeodesics with one end directed in direction θ. In this paper, we show that there are no bigeodesics with one end directed in any deterministic direction, assuming the shape boundary is differentiable. This rules out existence of ground state pairs for the related disordered ferromagnet whose interface has a deterministic direction. Furthermore, it resolves the BenjaminiKalai-Schramm "midpoint problem" [5, p. 1976] under the extra assumption that the limit shape boundary is differentiable.