The frog model on non-amenable trees

Abstract

We examine an interacting particle system on trees commonly referred to as the frog model. For its initial state, it begins with a single active particle at the root and i.i.d. Poiss(λ) many inactive particles at each non-root vertex. Active particles perform discrete time simple random walk and in the process activate any inactive particles they encounter. We show that for every non-amenable tree with bounded degree there exists a phase transition from transience to recurrence (with a non-trivial intermediate phase sometimes sandwiched in between) as λ varies.