In this paper we show that on bounded degree graphs and general trees, the cover time of the simple random walk is asymptotically equal to the product of the number of edges and the square of the expected supremum of the Gaussian free field on the graph, assuming that the maximal hitting time is significantly smaller than the cover time. Previously, this was only proved for regular trees and the 2D lattice. Furthermore, for general trees, we derive exponential concentration for the cover time, which implies that the standard deviation of the cover time is bounded by the geometric mean of the cover time and the maximal hitting time.
There are additional high precision estimates for cover times and Gaussian free fields on trees and 2D lattice: For regular binary trees @math of height @math , Bramson and Zeitouni @cite_13 proved that @math is tight after proper centering. For general trees, Feige and Zeitouni @cite_32 studied the computational perspective and designed a deterministic polynomial-time algorithm to approximate the cover time up to a factor of @math for any fixed @math . For the 2D lattice, in a recent breakthrough paper of Bramson and Zeitouni @cite_3 , it was shown that the supremum of the Gaussian free field is tight after proper centering, together with an estimate on its expectation up to an additive constant. It improved upon the tightness result along a subsequence by Bolthausen, Deuschel and Zeitouni @cite_1 , and a super-concentration result due to Chatterjee @cite_39 .
@cite_1 @cite_32 @cite_3 @cite_39 @cite_13
2057596055 1979312416 2906272554 2001123643
The cover time of a graph is a celebrated example of a parameter that is easy to approximate using a randomized algorithm, but for which no constant factor deterministic polynomial time approximation is known. A breakthrough due to Kahn, Kim, Lovasz and Vu [25] yielded a (log logn)2 polynomial time approximation. We refine the upper bound of [25], and show that the resulting bound is sharp and explicitly computable in random graphs. Cooper and Frieze showed that the cover time of the largest component of the Erdős–Renyi random graph G(n, c n) in the supercritical regime with c > 1 fixed, is asymptotic to ϕ(c)nlog2n, where ϕ(c) → 1 as c ↓ 1. However, our new bound implies that the cover time for the critical Erdős–Renyi random graph G(n, 1 n) has order n, and shows how the cover time evolves from the critical window to the supercritical phase. Our general estimate also yields the order of the cover time for a variety of other concrete graphs, including critical percolation clusters on the Hamming hypercube 0, 1 n, on high-girth expanders, and on tori ℤdn for fixed large d. This approach also gives a simpler proof of a result of Aldous [2] that the cover time of a uniform labelled tree on k vertices is of order k3 2. For the graphs we consider, our results show that the blanket time, introduced by Winkler and Zuckerman [45], is within a constant factor of the cover time. Finally, we prove that for any connected graph, adding an edge can increase the cover time by at most a factor of 4. In this paper we show that on bounded degree graphs and general trees, the cover time of the simple random walk is asymptotically equal to the product of the number of edges and the square of the expected supremum of the Gaussian free field on the graph, assuming that the maximal hitting time is significantly smaller than the cover time. Previously, this was only proved for regular trees and the 2D lattice. Furthermore, for general trees, we derive exponential concentration for the cover time, which implies that the standard deviation of the cover time is bounded by the geometric mean of the cover time and the maximal hitting time. We consider a continuous time random walk on the rooted binary tree of depth @math with all transition rates equal to one and study its cover time, namely the time until all vertices of the tree have been visited. We prove that, normalized by @math and then centered by @math , the cover time admits a weak limit as the depth of the tree tends to infinity. The limiting distribution is identified as that of a Gumbel random variable with rate one, shifted randomly by the logarithm of the sum of the limits of the derivative martingales associated with two negatively correlated discrete Gaussian free fields on the infinite version of the tree. The existence of the limit and its overall form were conjectured in the literature. Our approach is quite different from those taken in earlier works on this subject and relies in great part on a comparison with the extremal landscape of the discrete Gaussian free field on the tree. We compute the second order correction for the cover time of the binary tree of depth n by (continuous-time) random walk, and show that with probability approaching 1 as n increases, τcov=|E|[2log2⋅n−logn 2log2+O((loglogn)8)], thus showing that the second order correction differs from the corresponding one for the maximum of the Gaussian free field on the tree.