Asymptotics of one-dimensional forest fire processes (Q1958459)

Two families of independent Poisson processes, one with rate \(1\) another with rate \(\lambda \), are combined to model the so-called one-dimensional forest fire process (FFP). It is known that, from the point of view of self-organized criticality, an interesting behavior appears in the asymptotic regime \(\lambda \rightarrow 0\). The asymptotic behavior of such \(\lambda \)-FFP model as \(\lambda \rightarrow 0\) has been studied heuristically and numerically. However, mathematically rigorous results are scarse. In this paper a limit theorem is derived rigorusly, showing that the \(\lambda \)-FFP converges (under suitable rescaling) to some limit forest fire process. Its dynamics is precisely described. The limiting process is unique, can be built by means of a graphical construction and is amenable to reliable simulations. Asymptotic estimates are derived for the cluster-size distribution of the forest fire process.