A grain of dust falling through a Sierpinski gasket (Q2644339)

The authors are concerned with the downward random motion of a particle in a vertical, bounded Sierpinski gasket \(G\), where at each layer either absorption or delay occurs. In the case of motion with absorption, the explicit distribution of the position of the descending particle in the pre-gasket \(G_{n}\) is obtained and the limiting case of Sierpinski gasket is discussed. In the case of \ delayed downward motion, the authors derive a representation of the random time needed to arrive at the base of \(G_{n}\) in terms of independent binomial random variables (describing the contribution of delays at different layers with different geometrical structures).