Majority bootstrap percolation on the permutahedron and other high-dimensional graphs

Abstract

Majority bootstrap percolation is a model of infection spreading in networks. Starting with a set of initially infected vertices, new vertices become infected once half of their neighbours are infected. Balogh, Bollobás and Morris studied this process on the hypercube and showed that there is a phase transition as the density of the initially infected set increases. Generalising their results to a broad class of high-dimensional graphs, the authors of this work established similar bounds on the critical window, establishing a universal behaviour for these graphs. These methods necessitated an exponential bound on the order of the graphs in terms of their degrees. In this paper, we consider a slightly more restrictive class of high-dimensional graphs, which nevertheless covers most examples considered previously. Under these stronger assumptions, we are able to show that this universal behaviour holds in graphs of superexponential order. As a concrete and motivating example, we apply this result to the permutahedron, a symmetric high-dimensional graph of superexponential order which arises naturally in many areas of mathematics. Our methods also allow us to slightly improve the bounds on the critical window given in previous work, in particular in the case of the hypercube. Finally, the upper and lower bounds on the critical window depend on the maximum and minimum degree of the graph, respectively, leading to much worse bounds for irregular graphs. We also analyse an explicit example of a high-dimensional irregular graph, namely the Cartesian product of stars and determine the first two terms in the expansion of the critical probability, which in this case is determined by the minimum degree.