The critical manifolds of inhomogeneous bond percolation on bow-tie and checkerboard lattices

We give a conditional derivation of the inhomogeneous critical percolation manifold of the bow-tie lattice with five different probabilities, a problem that does not appear at first to fall into any known solvable class. Although our argument is mathematically rigorous only on a region of the manifold, we conjecture that the formula is correct over its entire domain, and we provide a non-rigorous argument for this that employs the negative probability regime of the triangular lattice critical surface. We discuss how the rigorous portion of our result substantially broadens the range of lattices in the solvable class to include certain inhomogeneous and asymmetric bow-tie lattices, and that, if it could be put on a firm foundation, the negative probability portion of our method would extend this class to many further systems, including F Y Wu’s checkerboard formula for the square lattice. We conclude by showing that this latter problem can in fact be proved using a recent result of Grimmett and Manolescu for isoradial graphs, lending strong evidence in favor of our other conjectured results. This article is part of ‘Lattice models and integrability’, a special issue of Journal of Physics A: Mathematical and Theoretical in honour of F Y Wu’s 80th birthday. PACS numbers: 64.60.Ak, 05.20.−y, 89.75.Hc, 05.50.+q, 05.70.Jk (Some figures may appear in colour only in the online journal)