Universality of dishonesty of substochastic semigroups: shattering fragmentations and explosive birth-and-death processes (Q2388635)

Many mathematical models describing the evolution of the density of a certain quantity (mass, number of particles or individuals) are obtained by balancing the total loss and gain of this quantity, given by the appropriate laws of nature. Hence it is natural to expect that the total amount of this quantity in the system should follow the laws used in the modeling process. However, it has been observed that, in a number of models, this property does not hold, that is, the described quantity leaks out of the system faster than predicted by the conservation laws used to build the model; for example, there could be a leakage from the system even if it is formally conservative. Such models are known in the theory of Markov processes as explosive or dishonest. Classical examples are offered by explosive birth-and-death processes which, being formally conservative, suffer from the loss of individuals in the course of evolution and shattering fragmentation, where the total mass is decreasing faster than predicted by the formal conservation laws. In this paper, the authors show that, in fragmentation and birth-and-death models, the dishonesty is universal so that if dishonesty occurs for one initial datum, then it must occur for any of them. Moreover, they show that the shattering fragmentation is generic in the sense that if it happens in systems allowing clusters of size bounded by an arbitrary fixed number (including infinity), then it must happen in systems with cluster size bounded from above by any other number.