Fluctuations in first-passage percolation

Abstract

We present a survey of techniques to obtain upper bounds for the variance of the passage time in first-passage percolation. The methods discussed are a combination of tools from the theory of concentration of measure, some of which we briefly review. These are combined with variations on an idea of Benjamini-Kalai-Schramm to obtain a logarithmic improvement over the linear bound implied by the Efron-Stein/Poincare inequality, for general edge-weight distributions.