On the most likely geodesic in last passage percolation

Sam McKeown; Shuta Nakajima

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arXiv · 2608.11378

On the most likely geodesic in last passage percolation

Sam McKeown·Shuta Nakajima

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Abstract

We consider the problem of identifying the paths most likely to occur as geodesics in last passage percolation. Heuristics suggest that these modal paths should be the extreme corner paths, going straight between the corners of the cube of accessible vertices. We identify three mechanisms which favour such corner paths, and show that they are more likely to appear than all but a vanishingly small portion of paths. We make more specific comparisons in exponential last passage percolation, where moderate deviation estimates may be used to show that corner paths are nearly modal in a precise sense. Finally, we show a form of monotonicity of geodesic probabilities in a special case and conjecture that this holds in general.

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Sam McKeown, Shuta Nakajima. 2026-08-11. On the most likely geodesic in last passage percolation. https://arxiv.org/abs/2608.11378

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