Late Points and Cover Times of Projections of Planar Symmetric Random Walks on the Lattice Torus

Abstract

We examine the sets of late points of a symmetric random walk on $Z^2$ projected onto the torus $Z^2_K$, culminating in a limit theorem for the cover time of the toral random walk. This extends the work done for the simple random walk in Dembo, et al. (2006) to a large class of random walks projected onto the lattice torus. The approach uses comparisons between planar and toral hitting times and distributions on annuli, and uses only random walk methods.