How does bond percolation happen in coloured networks?

Abstract

Percolation in complex networks is viewed as both: a process that mimics network degradation and a tool that reveals peculiarities of the underlying network structure. During the course of percolation, networks undergo non-trivial transformations that include a phase transition in the connectivity, and in some special cases, multiple phase transitions. Here we establish a generic analytic theory that describes how structure and sizes of all connected components in the network are affected by simple and colour-dependant bond percolations. This theory predicts all locations where the phase transitions take place, existence of wide critical windows that do not vanish in the thermodynamic limit, and a peculiar phenomenon of colour switching that occurs in small connected components. These results may be used to design percolation-like processes with desired properties, optimise network response to percolation, and detect subtle signals that provide an early warning of a network collapse.