Unique continuation on planar graphs

Abstract

We show that a discrete harmonic function which is bounded on a large portion of a periodic planar graph is constant. A key ingredient is a new unique continuation result for the weighted graph Laplacian. The proof relies on the structure of level sets of discrete harmonic functions, using arguments as in Bou-Rabee--Cooperman--Dario (2023) which exploit the fact that, on a planar graph, the sub- and super-level sets cannot cross over each other. In the special case of the square lattice this yields a new, geometric proof of the Liouville theorem of Buhovsky--Logunov--Malinnikova--Sodin (2017).