Random walks on trees with finitely many cone types (Q1610505)

Consider an infinite tree \(T\) with root \(o\). Let the cone of a vertex \(x\) be the subtree \(C_x\) of all vertices which can only be reached from \(o\) with paths going through \(x\). The tree \(T\) has finitely many cone types if the cones \(C_x, x \in T\), belong to finitely many isomorphy classes. The paper investigates random walks on trees with finitely many cone types. The authors give a criterion for transience, positive recurrence or nullrecurrence of the random walk, involving the largest eigenvalue of a certain matrix \(A\). Under an irreducibility assumption, they derive the asymptotic behaviour of the \(2n\)-step transition probabilities \(p^{2n}(o,o)\). They show that the random walk is transient if and only if these transition probabilities decay exponentially (or, in other words, if and only if the spectral radius is strictly less than \(1\)). In the transient case, they prove a law of large numbers and a central limit theorem for the random walk. Counterexamples are presented to show that the irreducibility assumption is indeed needed. In the transient case, the authors also consider the evolution of the exit points \(W_k\), \(k=0,1, \ldots \), where \(W_k\) is the last visited site at distance \(k\) from the root.