Cascades of particles moving at finite velocity in hyperbolic spaces (Q1012687)

The paper deals with a branching process moving over geodesic lines in a hyperbolic space. The process starts with one particle with mass 1 moving at speed \(c\) along the main geodesic starting from the origin; after a poisson distributed interval (with parameter \(\lambda\)) the particle splits into two identical particles of mass 1/2: one of them moving along the original geodesic (without further changes) and the other one along a randomly chosen orthogonal geodesic. After another random interval, the second particle undergoes the same splitting process and so on. Hence at time \(t\) there are \(N(t)+1\) particles (\(N(t)\) being the number of Poisson events occurred in the interval \([0,t]\)) of mass \(1/2, 1/4, \ldots, 1/2^{N(t)}, 1/2^{N(t)}\). The authors derive explicitly the expected (hyperbolic) distance between the origin and the center of mass of the cloud of particles and they prove that this expected distance tends to infinity as time increases. The give two independent proofs: one by using the Laplace Transform and the other by means of a system of differential equations which leads to the second order linear differential equation satisfied by the mean-value of the distance. Finally the mean hyperbolic distance of the \(k\)th particle is considered and it is compared with the expected hyperbolic distance of a single particle moving along the main geodesic and stopped at a randomly distributed time.