Agglomerative Percolation on Bipartite Networks: A Novel Type of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking

Ordinary bond percolation (OP) can be viewed as a process where clusters grow by joining them pairwise, by adding links chosen randomly one by one from a set of predefined virtual' links. In contrast, in agglomerative percolation (AP) clusters grow by choosing randomly a target cluster’ and joining it with all its neighbors, as defined by the same set of virtual links. Previous studies showed that AP is in different universality classes from OP for several types of (virtual) networks (linear chains, trees, Erdos-Renyi networks), but most surprising were the results for 2-d lattices: While AP on the triangular lattice was found to be in the OP universality class, it behaved completely differently on the square lattice. In the present paper we explain this striking violation of universality by invoking bipartivity. While the square lattice is a bipartite graph, the triangular lattice is not. In conformity with this we show that AP on the honeycomb and simple cubic (3-d) lattices – both of which are bipartite – are also not in the OP universality classes. More precisely, we claim that this violation of universality is basically due to a Z_2 symmetry that is spontaneously broken at the percolation threshold. We also discuss AP on bipartite random networks and suitable generalizations of AP on k-partite graphs.