Unstable supercritical discontinuous percolation transitions

Abstract

The location and nature of the percolation transition in random networks is a subject of intense interest. Recently, a series of graph evolution processes have been introduced that lead to discontinuous percolation transitions where the addition of a single edge causes the size of the largest component to exhibit a significant macroscopic jump in the thermodynamic limit. These processes can have additional exotic behaviors, such as displaying a `Devil's staircase' of discrete jumps in the supercritical regime. Here we investigate whether the location of the largest jump coincides with the percolation threshold for a range of processes, such as Erdos-Renyi percolation, percolation via edge competition and via growth by overtaking. We find that the largest jump asymptotically occurs at the percolation transition for Erdos-Renyi and other processes exhibiting global continuity, including models exhibiting an `explosive' transition. However, for percolation processes exhibiting genuine discontinuities, the behavior is substantially richer. In percolation models where the order parameter exhibits a staircase, the largest discontinuity generically does not coincide with the percolation transition. For the generalized Bohman-Frieze-Wormald model, it depends on the model parameter. Distinct parameter regimes well in the supercritical regime feature unstable discontinuous transitions, which is a novel and unexpected phenomenon in percolation. We thus demonstrate that seemingly and genuinely discontinuous percolation transitions can involve a rich behavior in supercriticality, a regime that has been largely ignored in percolation.