Conditioned Brownian trees (Q2507601)

The authors define and study a continuous tree of one-dimensional Brownian paths started at the origin and conditioned to remain on the positive half-line. The Brownian tree may be generated from the Brownian snake driven by a normalized Brownian excursion, thus leading to a representation of the integrated super-Brownian excursion. The conditioned tree can be obtained by re-rooting the unconditioned one at the vertex corresponding to the minimal spatial position, in other terms, conditioning the integrated super-Brownian excursion such that no mass is on \(]-\infty,\varepsilon[\) and letting \(\varepsilon\to 0\) is equivalent to shifting the unconditioned process to the right so that the left-most point of its support becomes the origin. The conditioned tree may also be viewed as scaling limit of discrete spatial trees conditioned to remain positive: Consider a Galton-Watson tree with critical offspring distribution and (small) exponential moments, condition it to have exactly \(n\) vertices, combine this branching structure with a spatial displacement corresponding to a symmetric random walk with bounded jump-size on the integers, assume the root to be at the origin, condition the spatial tree to remain on the positive side, and let \(n\to\infty\). Several explicit estimates are derived along with a decomposition of the conditioned tree with fixed height \(h\). The decomposition involves a spine whose distribution is absolutely continuous with respect to that of a nine-dimensional Bessel process on the time interval \([0,h]\), and Poisson processes of subtrees originating from the spine.