Diamond aggregation

Internal diffusion-limited aggregation is a growth model based on random walk in ℤd. We study how the shape of the aggregate depends on the law of the underlying walk, focusing on a family of walks in ℤ2 for which the limiting shape is a diamond. Certain of these walks—those with a directional bias toward the origin—have at most logarithmic fluctuations around the limiting shape. This contrasts with the simple random walk, where the limiting shape is a disk and the best known bound on the fluctuations, due to Lawler, is a power law. Our walks enjoy a uniform layering property which simplifies many of the proofs.