The arboreal-gas bunkbed conjecture

Let GG be a graph, let G~\widetilde{G} be its associated bunkbed graph, and let μG~,λF\mu^{\text{F}}_{\widetilde{G},\lambda} denote the arboreal gas measure with parameter λ\lambda. For vertices u,vV(G)u,v\in V(G), write uivju_i\leftrightarrow v_j for connectivity in the bunkbed graph. Arboreal-gas bunkbed conjecture. For every graph GG, every λ\lambda, and every pair of vertices u,vV(G)u,v\in V(G),

μG~,λF(u1v1)μG~,λF(u1v2).\mu^{\text{F}}_{\widetilde{G},\lambda}(u_1\leftrightarrow v_1)\geq \mu^{\text{F}}_{\widetilde{G},\lambda}(u_1\leftrightarrow v_2).

The arboreal gas measure is a forest-valued weak limit of random cluster measures. The analogous random-cluster bunkbed statement is false for some ranges of qq, whereas this forest version is presented as a conjecture and is proved only in special cases.

Sources & referencesView supporting material

Primary source

Arvind Ayyer, Svante Linusson and Mohan Ravichandran, “The bunkbed problem and the random cluster model”, arXiv:2509.18788 (2025).

Additional references

5 papers in this index state this conjecture (2022–2025). The statement above is taken from the most recent of them; the others are arXiv:2506.22284, arXiv:2410.02545, arXiv:2302.00031, arXiv:2205.07318.

Progress summary

Never refreshed

Nothing recorded yet. Refresh searches the literature and the public web for attempts on this problem, and writes the first summary here.

Solutions 0

No solutions have been posted yet.