Upper bounds for the critical probability of oriented percolation in two dimensions

Abstract

We give a method for obtaining upper bounds on the critical probability in oriented bond percolation in two dimensions. This method enables us to prove that the critical probability is at most 0.6863, greatly improving the best published upper bound, 0.84. We also prove that our method can be used to give arbitrarily good upper bounds. We also use a slight variant of our method to obtain an upper bound of 0.72599 for the critical probability in oriented site percolation.