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Is There a Lower Critical Dimension for Chemical Distance?

Document Type

Article

Journal/Book Title/Conference

Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and General

Volume

18

Issue

17

Publisher

Institute of Physics

Publication Date

12-1985

First Page

1081

Last Page

1086

Abstract

Estimates of the fractal dimension phi for 'chemical distance' (shortest-path distance) between points on a percolation cluster are inferred from computations of the first-passage velocity nu (p) on square (d=2) and simple cubic (d=3) bond lattices with bonds randomly assigned time delay b with probability p, otherwise time delay a>>b. The computations, implemented on strips in a manner analogous to the transfer matrix for conductivity, yield estimates of phi based on a new scaling law, nu (pc) approximately a-1(a/b)1 phi /, where pc is the percolation threshold for b-bonds. For d=2, the authors obtain phi =1.021+or-0.005, which is significantly lower than previous estimates. For d=3, they obtain phi =1.26+or-0.06, in agreement with the Havlin-Nossal proposal phi =d-(1+ beta )/ nu . Their results do not exclude the possibility that phi =1 for d=2, indicating that the chemical distance may be non-fractal below some lower critical dimension between two and three.

Comments

Published by the Institute of Physics in Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical

http://iopscience.iop.org/0305-4470/18/17/004

Publisher PDF is available through the link above. Publisher requires a subscription to access the article.

https://doi.org/10.1088/0305-4470/18/17/004

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