Agglomerative percolation in two dimensions

Abstract

We study a process termed agglomerative percolation (AP) in two dimensions. Instead of adding sites or bonds at random, in AP randomly chosen clusters are linked to all their neighbors. As a result the growth process involves a diverging length scale near a critical point. Picking target clusters with probability proportional to their mass leads to a runaway compact cluster. Choosing all clusters equally leads to a continuous transition in a new universality class for the square lattice, while the transition on the triangular lattice has the same critical exponents as ordinary percolation -violating blatantly the basic notion of universality. Copyright (C) EPLA, 2012