Recurrence of strong-decay inhomogeneous long-range percolation clusters

Abstract

We prove recurrence criteria for inhomogeneous long-range percolation in dimensions one and two. In dimension one, recurrence follows from a purely geometric scarcity condition: long edges eventually disappear on exponential scales. This applies to weight-dependent random connection models and related one-dimensional spatial scale-free graphs whenever the standard strong-decay long-edge estimate holds. In dimension two, we combine the linear chemical-distance estimate of Lüchtrath with an area-order bound on the degree measure. Graph-distance layers in exponentially separated bands then give the required Nash-Williams cutsets for planar random geometric graphs satisfying the polynomial mixing and long-edge estimates [J. Theoret. Probab. 39 (2026), Paper No. 12]. As a concrete consequence, every connected component of the two-dimensional weight-dependent random connection model with interpolation kernel is recurrent throughout the strong-decay region $δ>2$, $γ<1-\frac{1}δ$, and $α<1-γ$.