Three-Neighbour Bootstrap Percolation in Thin Three-Dimensional Grids

Abstract

We improve the status of the problem of determining minimum-sized percolating sets in $a \times b \times c$ grids under the $3$-neighbour process. Using several new constructions, we show that optimal percolating sets exist whenever $\min(a,b,c) \ge 7$. As an important step toward this, we also show that all grids with $\min(a,b,c) \ge 4$ have a percolating set whose size exactly achieves the lower bound $(ab+ac+bc)/3$ whenever this value is an integer.