The compact support property for measure-valued processes (Q2433367)

From the authors' introduction and statement of results: The purpose of this article is to give a rather thorough understanding of the compact support property for measure-valued diffusion processes. In particular, we shall investigate how the interplay between the underlying motion and the branching affects the compact support property. In [[1]: the authors, Ann. Probab. 27, 684--730 (1999; Zbl 0979.60078)], the compact support property was shown to be equivalent to a certain analytic criterion concerning uniqueness of the Cauchy problem for the semi-linear parabolic equation related to the measured valued process. In a subsequent paper [[2]: the authors, J. Differ. Equations 192, 396--428 (2003; Zbl 1081.35050)], this analytic property was investigated purely from the point of view of partial differential equations. Some of the results obtained in this latter paper yield interesting results concerning the compact support property. In this paper, the results from [2] that are relevant to the compact support property are presented, sometimes with extensions. These results are interwoven with new results and some informal heuristics. Taken together, they yield a rather comprehensive picture of the compact support property. Inter alia, we show that the concept of a measure-valued process hitting a point can be investigated via the compact support property and suggest an alternate proof of a result concerning the hitting of points by super-Brownian motion. We state all of our results for the case that the underlying space is \(\mathbb R^d\); however, all the results also hold for generic domains in \(\mathbb R^d\) -- see [1], where the superprocesses studied in this paper are constructed on generic Euclidean domains.