Perturbing the hexagonal circle packing: a percolation perspective

We consider the hexagonal circle packing with radius 1/2 and perturb it by letting the circles move as independent Brownian motions for time t. It is shown that, for large enough t, if \Pi_t is the point process given by the center of the circles at time t, then, as t\to\infty, the critical radius for circles centered at \Pi_t to contain an infinite component converges to that of continuum percolation (which was shown—based on a Monte Carlo estimate—by Balister, Bollob'as and Walters to be strictly bigger than 1/2). On the other hand, for small enough t, we show (using a Monte Carlo estimate for a fixed but high dimensional integral) that the union of the circles contains an infinite connected component. We discuss some extensions and open problems.