Capacity of loop-erased random walk

Abstract

We study the capacity of loop-erased random walk (LERW) on $\mathbb{Z}^d$. For $d\geq4$, we prove a strong law of large numbers and give explicit expressions for the limit in terms of the non-intersection probabilities of a simple random walk and a two-sided LERW. Along the way, we show that four-dimensional LERW is ergodic. For $d=3$, we show that the scaling limit of the capacity of LERW is random. We show that the capacity of the first $n$ steps of LERW is of order $n^{1/\beta}$, with $\beta$ the growth exponent of three-dimensional LERW. We express the scaling limit of the capacity of LERW in terms of the capacity of Kozma's scaling limit of LERW. As a corollary, we obtain the scaling limit of the LERW in three dimensions when parametrized by its capacity.