Sublinear variance in Euclidean first-passage percolation

Abstract

The Euclidean first-passage percolation model of Howard and Newman is a rotationally invariant percolation model built on a Poisson point process. It is known that the passage time between 0 and $ne_1$ obeys a diffusive upper bound: $\mbox{Var}\, T(0,ne_1) \leq Cn$, and in this paper we improve this inequality to $Cn/\log n$. The methods follow the strategy used for sublinear variance proofs on the lattice, using the Falik-Samorodnitsky inequality and a Bernoulli encoding, but with substantial technical difficulties. To deal with the different setup of the Euclidean model, we represent the passage time as a function of Bernoulli sequences and uniform sequences, and develop several "greedy lattice animal" arguments.