Continuum tree limit for the range of random walks on regular trees (Q2368839)

The author studies, near the criticality, a transient random walk \(\{W_{n}^{\varepsilon}:n\geq 0\}\) on a \(b\)-ary rooted tree (\(b\geq 1\) integer) in a ``diffusive'' regime. The range of the random walk is a subtree which corresponds to a unique random ordered tree \(\tau_{\varepsilon}\). The main result of the paper asserts that \(\tau_{\varepsilon}\) converges in distribution, as \(\varepsilon\to 0\), to some continuum random tree encoded by two independent Brownian motions with drift conditioned to stay positive and scaled in time. Actually the result is stated in the case of an \(\infty\)-ary tree \(U\). The technical point of the paper concerns the identification of the limiting tree by studying precisely the ``shrinking effect'' via explicit computations for a \(U\)-indexed Markov process.