\(p\)-adic boundary laws and Markov chains on trees (Q2224490)

In the present paper, the authors introduce \(p\)-adic Markov chains through boundary laws on general infinite trees. The authors find a sufficient condition of the uniqueness (resp. non-uniqueness) of \(p\)-adic Markov chain. They discuss the boundedness of the \(p\)-adic Markov chain. Then, the authors present some conditions ensuring that the \(p\)-adic Markov chain is (resp. not) bounded. As it is well known that a \(p\)-adic Markov chain can be considered as a particular case of \(p\)-adic Gibbs measure defined through the \(p\)-adic exponential \(\exp_p(x)\), with \(|x|_p < p^{-1/(p-1)}\), where \(|x|_p \) is the \(p\)-adic norm of \(x\). Let us consider the stochastic matrix \(Q_b = (Q_b(i,j))^{q}_{i,j=1}\). The authors prove that under given conditions the equation \[ z_i(x,y)=\prod_{v\in \partial \{x\}\setminus \{y\}} \frac{1+\sum_{j=1}^{o-1} (z_j(v,x)-1)Q_{(v,x)}(j,i)}{1+\sum_{j=1}^{o-1} (z_j(v,x)-1)Q_{(v,x)}(j,q)},i=0,1,\dots,q-1 \] has a unique solution \(z(x, y)\equiv (1, 1, \dots , 1)\in \mathcal{E}_p^{q-1}=\left\{x\in \mathbb{Q}_p:|x-1|_p\leq \frac{1}{p}\right\}\), vertices \(x\) and \(y\) are nearest neighbors, where the \(p\)-adic field \(\mathbb{Q}_p\) is the completion of \(\mathbb{Q}\) with respect to the \(p\)-adic norm. The authors prove that if some sufficient conditions are satisfied then for the matrix \(Q_b\) on the Cayley tree of order \(k\geq 1\), there are at least two \(p\)-adic Markov chains. In the last section, the authors focus on finding out whether a \(p\)-adic Markov chain is bounded. This excellent article will contribute to solving new problems in a \(p\)-adic setting.