In this paper we review the recent advances on explosive percolation, a very sharp phase transition first observed by Achlioptas et al. (Science, 2009). There a simple model was proposed, which changed slightly the classical percolation process so that the emergence of the spanning cluster is delayed. This slight modification turns out to have a great impact on the percolation phase transition. The resulting transition is so sharp that it was termed explosive, and it was at first considered to be discontinuous. This surprising fact stimulated considerable interest in "Achlioptas processes". Later work, however, showed that the transition is continuous (at least for Achlioptas processes on Erdös networks), but with very unusual finite size scaling. We present a review of the field, indicate open "problems" and propose directions for future research.

In phase transition phenomena, the estimation of the critical point is crucial for the calculation of the various critical exponents and the determination of the universality class they belong to. However, this is not an easy task, since a huge amount of realizations is needed to eliminate the noise in the data. In this paper, we introduce a novel method for the simultaneous estimation of the critical point pc and the critical exponent β/ν, applied for the case of "explosive" bond percolation on 2D square lattices and ER networks. The results show that with only a few hundred of realizations, it is possible to acquire accurate values for these quantities. Guidelines are given at the end for the applicability of the method to other cases as well.

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We consider a simple model for the geminate electron-hole separation process in organic photovoltaic cells, in order to illustrate the influence of dimensionality of conducting channels on the efficiency of the process. The Miller-Abrahams expression for the transition rates between nearest neighbor sites was used for simulating random walks of the electron in the Coulomb field of the hole. The non-equilibrium kinetic Monte Carlo simulation results qualitatively confirm the equilibrium estimations, although quantitatively the efficiency of the higher dimensional systems is less pronounced. The lifetime of the electron prior to recombination is approximately equal to the lifetime prior to dissociation. Their values indicate that electrons perform long stochastic walks before they are captured by the collector or recombined. The non-equilibrium free energy considerably differs from the equilibrium one. The efficiency of the separation process decreases with increasing the distance to the collector, and this decrease is considerably less pronounced for the three dimensional system. The simulation results are in good agreement with the extension of the continuum Onsager theory that accounts for the finite recombination rate at nonzero reaction radius and non-exponential kinetics of the charge separation process.

We extend the Achlioptas model for the delay of criticality in the percolation problem. Instead of having a completely random connectivity pattern, we generalize the idea of the two-site probe in the Achlioptas model for connecting smaller clusters, by introducing two models: the first one by allowing any number k of probe sites to be investigated, k being a parameter, and the second one independent of any specific number of probe sites, but with a probabilistic character which depends on the size of the resulting clusters. We find numerically the complete spectrum of critical points and our results indicate that the value of the critical point behaves linearly with k after the value of k = 3. The range k = 2-3 is not linear but parabolic. The more general model of generating clusters with probability inversely proportional to the size of the resulting cluster produces a critical point which is equivalent to the value of k being in the range k = 5-7.