Survival of inhomogeneous Galton-Watson processes

We consider the simple random walk on Galton-Watson trees with supercritical offspring distribution, conditioned on non-extinction. In case the offspring distribution has finite support, we prove an upper bound for the annealed return probability to the root which decays subexponentially in time with exponent 1/3. This exponent is optimal. Our result improves the previously known subexponential upper bound with exponent 1/5 by Piau [Ann. Probab. 26, 1016-1040 (1998)]. For off...

Consider a branching process $\{Z_n\}_{n\ge 0}$ with immigration in varying environment. For $a\in\{0,1,2,...\},$ let $C=\{n\ge0:Z_n=a\}$ be the collection of times at which the population size of the process attains level $a.$ We give a criterion to determine whether the set $C$ is finite or not. For critical Galton-Watson process, we show that $|C\cap [1,n]|/\log n\rightarrow S$ in distribution, where $S$ is an exponentially distributed random variable with $P(S>t)=e^{-t},\...

Conditions for almost sure extinction are studied in discrete time branching processes with an infinite number of types. It is not assumed that the expected number of children is a bounded function of the parent's type. There might also be no integer m such that there is a lower positive bound, uniform over the ancestor's type, for the probability that a population is extinct at the m-th generation. A weaker condition than the existence of such an m is seen to lead to extinct...

The key to our investigation is an improved (and in a sense sharp) understanding of the survival time of the contact process on star graphs. Using these results, we show that for the contact process on Galton-Watson trees, when the offspring distribution (i) is subexponential the critical value for local survival $\lambda_2=0$ and (ii) when it is geometric($p$) we have $\lambda_2 \le C_p$, where the $C_p$ are much smaller than previous estimates. We also study the critical va...

We present a new pruning procedure on discrete trees by adding marks on the nodes of trees. This procedure allows us to construct and study a tree-valued Markov process $\{{\cal G}(u)\}$ by pruning Galton-Watson trees and an analogous process $\{{\cal G}^*(u)\}$ by pruning a critical or subcritical Galton-Watson tree conditioned to be infinite. Under a mild condition on offspring distributions, we show that the process $\{{\cal G}(u)\}$ run until its ascension time has a repr...

In this paper, we show that a Galton-Watson tree conditioned to have a fixed number of particles in generation $n$ converges in distribution as $n\rightarrow\infty$, and with this tool we study the span and gap statistics of a branching random walk on such trees, which is the discrete version of Ramola, Majumdar and Schehr 2015, generalized to arbitrary offspring and displacement distributions with moment constraints.

We consider the biased random walk on a critical Galton-Watson tree conditioned to survive, and confirm that this model with trapping belongs to the same universality class as certain one-dimensional trapping models with slowly-varying tails. Indeed, in each of these two settings, we establish closely-related functional limit theorems involving an extremal process and also demonstrate extremal aging occurs.

A critical branching process $\left\{Z_{k},k=0,1,2,...\right\} $ in a random environment generated by a sequence of independent and identically distributed random reproduction laws is considered.\ Let $Z_{p,n}$ be the number of particles at time $p\leq n$ having a positive offspring number at time $n$. \ A theorem is proved describing the limiting behavior, as $% n\rightarrow \infty $ of the distribution of a properly scaled process $\log Z_{p,n}$ under the assumptions $Z_{n}...

We investigate level-set percolation of the Gaussian free field on transient trees, for instance on super-critical Galton-Watson trees conditioned on non-extinction. Recently developed Dynkin-type isomorphism theorems provide a comparison with percolation of the vacant set of random interlacements, which is more tractable in the case of trees. If $h_*$ and $u_*$ denote the respective (non-negative) critical values of level-set percolation of the Gaussian free field and of the...

We consider the critical Galton-Watson process with overlapping generations stemming from a single founder. Assuming that both the variance of the offspring number and the average generation length are finite, we establish the convergence of the finite-dimensional distributions, conditioned on non-extinction at a remote time of observation. The limiting process is identified as a pure death process coming down from infinity. This result brings a new perspective on Vatutin's...