Critical branching Brownian motion with absorption: survival probability

We consider branching Brownian motion on the real line with absorption at zero, in which particles move according to independent Brownian motions with the critical drift of $-\sqrt{2}$. Kesten (1978) showed that almost surely this process eventually dies out. Here we obtain upper and lower bounds on the probability that the process survives until some large time $t$. These bounds improve upon results of Kesten (1978), and partially confirm nonrigorous predictions of Derrida and Simon (2007)

Critical branching Brownian motion with absorption: particle configurations

We consider critical branching Brownian motion with absorption, in which there is initially a single particle at $x > 0$, particles move according to independent one-dimensional Brownian motions with the critical drift of $-\sqrt{2}$, and particles are absorbed when they reach zero. Here we obtain asymptotic results concerning the behavior of the process before the extinction time, as the position $x$ of the initial particle tends to infinity. We estimate the number of particles in the system at a given time and the position of the right-most particle. We also obtain asymptotic results for the configuration of particles at a typical time

An integral test for the transience of a Brownian path with limited local time

We study a one-dimensional Brownian motion conditioned on a self-repelling behaviour. Given a nondecreasing positive function f(t), consider the measures mu_t obtained by conditioning a Brownian path so that L_s< f(s), for all s<t, where L_s is the local time spent at the origin by time s. It is shown that the measures mu_t are tight, and that any weak limit of mu_t as t tends to infinity is transient provided that t^{-3/2}f(t) is integrable. We conjecture that this condition is sharp and present a number of open problems.Comment: 3 figures. Some typos corrected

Gibbs distributions for random partitions generated by a fragmentation process

In this paper we study random partitions of 1,...n, where every cluster of size j can be in any of w\_j possible internal states. The Gibbs (n,k,w) distribution is obtained by sampling uniformly among such partitions with k clusters. We provide conditions on the weight sequence w allowing construction of a partition valued random process where at step k the state has the Gibbs (n,k,w) distribution, so the partition is subject to irreversible fragmentation as time evolves. For a particular one-parameter family of weight sequences w\_j, the time-reversed process is the discrete Marcus-Lushnikov coalescent process with affine collision rate K\_{i,j}=a+b(i+j) for some real numbers a and b. Under further restrictions on a and b, the fragmentation process can be realized by conditioning a Galton-Watson tree with suitable offspring distribution to have n nodes, and cutting the edges of this tree by random sampling of edges without replacement, to partition the tree into a collection of subtrees. Suitable offspring distributions include the binomial, negative binomial and Poisson distributions.Comment: 38 pages, 2 figures, version considerably modified. To appear in the Journal of Statistical Physic

The random walk penalised by its range in dimensions d≥3d\geq 3

We study a self-attractive random walk such that each trajectory of length $N$ is penalised by a factor proportional to $\exp ( - |R_N|)$, where $R_N$ is the set of sites visited by the walk. We show that the range of such a walk is close to a solid Euclidean ball of radius approximately $\rho_d N^{1/(d+2)}$, for some explicit constant $\rho_d >0$. This proves a conjecture of Bolthausen who obtained this result in the case $d=2$.Comment: Revised version, local errors and typos correcte