Probability tilting of compensated fragmentations

Abstract

Fragmentation processes are part of a broad class of models describing the evolution of a system of particles which split apart at random. These models are widely used in biology, materials science and nuclear physics, and their asymptotic behaviour at large times is interesting both mathematically and practically. The spine decomposition is a key tool in its study. In this work, we consider the class of compensated fragmentations, or homogeneous growth-fragmentations, recently defined by Bertoin. We give a complete spine decomposition of these processes in terms of a L\'evy process with immigration, and apply our result to study the asymptotic properties of the derivative martingale.Comment: 41 pages, 1 figure. This revised version improves the conditions in Theorem 6.