The tube property for the swiss cheese problem

In 2001 Bolthausen, den Hollander and van den Berg obtained the asymptotics of the probability that the volume of a Wiener sausage at time t is smaller than expected by a fixed muliplicative constant. This asymptotics was given by a variational formula and they conjectured that the best strategy to achieve such a large deviation event is for the underlying Brownian motion to behave like a swiss cheese: stay most of the time inside a ball of subdiffusive size, visit most of the points but leave some random holes. They moreover conjectured that to do so the Brownian motion behaves like a Brownian motion in a drift field given by a function of the maximizer of the variational problem.

In this talk I will talk about the corresponding problem for the random walk and will explain that conditioned to having a small range its properly defined empirical measure is indeed close to the maximizer of the above mentioned variational problem.

This is joint work with Julien Poisat.