"True" self-avoiding walks on general trees

Abstract

We study the asymptotic behavior of ``true" self-avoiding random walks on general infinite locally finite trees. In this model, the walk starts at the root and, at each step, from its current vertex chooses a neighboring edge to traverse with probability proportional to the current weight of that edge, where the weight of each edge after being traversed $n$ times is given by $w(n)=\exp(-\beta n)$. We show that the process exhibits a sharp phase transition between recurrence and transience. The critical value is determined by the branching-ruin number of the tree, which coincides with the Hausdorff dimension of the boundary of the tree under a suitable metric. We prove that the walk is almost surely transient when the branching-ruin number is greater than $1/2$, and recurrent when it is less than $1/2$. This resolves an open question posed by Kosygina.