On the site percolation threshold of circle packings and planar graphs, with application to the loop O(n) model

A circle packing is a collection of circles in the plane with disjoint interiors. An accumulation point of the circle packing is a point with infinitely many circles in any neighborhood of it. A site percolation with parameter p on the circle packing means retaining each circle with probability p and deleting it with probability 1-p, independently between circles. We will explain the proof of the following result: There exists p>0 satisfying that for any circle packing with finitely many accumulation points, after a site percolation with parameter p there is no infinite connected component of retained circles, almost surely. This implies, in particular, that the site percolation threshold of any planar recurrent graph is at least p. It is conjectured that the same should hold with p=1/2. The result gives a partial answer to a question of Benjamini, who conjectured that square packings of the unit square admit long crossings after site percolation with parameter p=1/2 and asked also about other values of p. Time permitting, we will discuss an application of the result to the existence of macroscopic loops in the loop O(n) model on the hexagonal lattice. Portions joint with Nick Crawford, Alexandar Glazman and Matan Harel.