Plaquettes, Spheres, and Entanglement

Abstract

The high-density plaquette percolation model in $d$ dimensions contains a surface that is homeomorphic to the $(d-1)$-sphere and encloses the origin. This is proved by a path-counting argument in a dual model. When $d=3$, this permits an improved lower bound on the critical point $p_e$ of entanglement percolation, namely $p_e\geq \mu^{-2}$ where $\mu$ is the connective constant for self-avoiding walks on $\mathbb{Z}^3$. Furthermore, when the edge density $p$ is below this bound, the radius of the entanglement cluster containing the origin has an exponentially decaying tail.