Bounds on the speed and on regeneration times for certain processes on regular trees (Q549869)

The authors develop a technique that provides a lower bound on the speed of transient random walks in a random environment on regular trees. An auxiliary branching process is constructed to this aim. The escape probability from the root of the tree is proved to be bounded from below by the survival probability of the branching process. This result and an upper bound for the expected number of returns to the root provide a lower bound on the speed. A refinement of this technique yields upper bounds on the first generation level and regeneration time. In particular, a lower and upper bound on the covariance in the annealed invariance principle follows. These methods are general and also apply in the case of once-reinforced random walks. \textit{R. Durrett, H. Kesten} and \textit{V. Limic} [Probab. Theory Relat. Fields 122, No. 4, 567--592 (2002; Zbl 0995.60042)] proved an upper bound of the form \(b/(b+\delta)\) for the speed on the \(b\)-ary tree, where \(\delta\) is the reinforcement parameter. For \(\delta>1\), the authors provide a lower bound of the form \(\gamma^2b/(b+\delta)\), where \(\gamma\) is the survival probability of the associated branching process.