The total external length of the evolving Kingman coalescent (Q525109)

The Kingman coalescent is a probabilistic model for describing genealogies of populations. With a population of size \(n\) it is associated the \(n\)-Kingman coalescent which is depicted by a binary tree started with \(n\) leaves. The evolution of the process in time is defined by a partition-valued Markov process \(\Pi=\{\Pi_k\}_{1\leq k\leq n}\) started from the partition \(\pi_n=([1],\dots,[n])\) of the set \((1,2,\ldots,n)\) into singletons. The Markovian transition mechanism is given as follows. If the process is in a state \(\pi_k\) it spends at this state the exponential time \(X_k\) with parameter \(\binom k 2\), and then jumps to the state obtained from \(\pi_k\) by merging two randomly chosen blocks in \(\pi_k\). The paper focuses on a particular functional of the process known in the literature as total external length of of branches (= the sum of the lengths of external branches). The main result of the paper establishes the limiting behavior, as \(n\to \infty\) of the above functional.