Nonexistence of Bigeodesics in planar exponential last passage percolation

Abstract

Bi-infinite geodesics are fundamental objects of interest in planar first passage percolation. A longstanding conjecture states that under mild conditions there are almost surely no bigeodesics; however, the result has not been proved in any case. For the exactly solvable model of directed last passage percolation on ℤ² with i.i.d. exponential passage times, we study the corresponding question and show that almost surely the only bigeodesics are the trivial ones, i.e., the horizontal and vertical lines. The proof makes use of estimates for last passage time available from the integrable probability literature to study coalescence structure of finite geodesics, thereby making rigorous a heuristic argument due to Newman (Auffinger et al., 50 Years of First-passage Percolation, American Mathematical Soc., 2017).