Differentiability of Shape Function for Piecewise Smooth Lagrangians in Poissonian Random Environments

Source abstract

We consider a family of models of directed first passage percolation type in continuous multi-dimensional Euclidean space and discrete time with admissible paths constrained to visiting a Poissonian point at each step. We show that even if the Lagrangian defining the cost or energy of a step is allowed to have gradient discontinuities, the resulting shape function, or effective Lagrangian, belongs to the class C1 and provide a formula for its gradient. We also study the limit shapes for the associated growth model. We show that the part of the boundary of the limit shape that can be called the effective front is also C1, and we describe the complementary part, the footprint. We include a study of several concrete examples and several simulations.