CHOOSING A SPANNING TREE FOR THE INTEGER LATTICE UNIFORMLY Running Head: RANDOM SPANNING TREES

Consider the nearest neighbor graph for the integer lattice Z in d dimensions. For a large finite piece of it, consider choosing a spanning tree for that piece uniformly among all possible subgraphs that are spanning trees. As the piece gets larger, this approaches a limiting measure on the set of spanning graphs for Z. This is shown to be a tree if and only if d ≤ 4. In this case, the tree has only one topological end, i.e. there are no doubly infinite paths. When d ≥ 5 the spanning forest has infinitely many components almost surely, with each component having one or two topological ends.