First passage percolation on the exponential of two-dimensional branching random walk

Abstract

We consider the branching random walk $\{\mathcal R^N_z: z\in V_N\}$ with Gaussian increments indexed over a two-dimensional box $V_N$ of side length $N$, and we study the first passage percolation where each vertex is assigned weight $e^{\gamma \mathcal R^N_z}$ for $\gamma>0$. We show that for $\gamma>0$ sufficiently small but fixed, the expected FPP distance between the left and right boundaries is at most $O(N^{1 - \gamma^2/10})$.