Professor Ziff carries out computational and theoretical studies of various physical problems, most notably percolation but also catalysis modeling and several reaction/diffusion systems. For percolation, he has developed various algorithms that have allowed substantial increases in performance, for the study of threshold behavior, crossing probability, etc. He also studies algorithms for efficiently simulating rare-event simulations such as chemical reactions and diffusion-limited aggregation.

Inside a diffusion-limited aggregation (DLA) cluster, grown using an accelerated rare-event algorithm.