Collisions of random walks

A recurrent graph G has the infinite collision property if two independent random walks on G, started at the same point, collide infinitely often a.s. We give a simple criterion in terms of Green functions for a graph to have this property, and use it to prove that a critical Galton-Watson tree with finite variance conditioned to survive, the incipient infinite cluster in Z(d) with d >= 19 and the uniform spanning tree in Z(2) all have the infinite collision property. For power-law combs and spherically symmetric trees, we determine precisely the phase boundary for the infinite collision property.