Branching Brownian motion in a strip: survival near criticality (Q272951)

The authors consider a branching Brownian motion with linear drift \(-\mu\leq 0\) in which particles are killed on exiting the interval \((0,K)\), where \(K\geq 0\). Any living particle is replaced, at constant rate \(\beta>0\), by a random number \(A\) of offspring, where \(A\) is a random variable with mean \(m>1\) and such that \(\mathbb E [A\log^+ A]<\infty\). The authors are interested in the regime when the width \(K\) of the interval shrinks to a critical value \(K_0\) at which survival of the system is no longer possible. The authors combine spine techniques and a backbone decomposition to obtain exact asymptotics for the near-critical survival probability. This is used to deduce the existence of a quasi-stationary limit result for the process conditioned on survival. The work under review is motivated by recent papers on survival of near critical branching Brownian motion with absorption at the origin by \textit{E. Aïdékon} and \textit{S. Harris} [``Near-critical survival probability of branching Brownian motion with an absorbing barrier'', unpublished manuscript] as well as the work of \textit{J. Berestycki} et al. [Ann. Probab. 41, No. 2, 527--618 (2013; Zbl 1304.60088); J. Stat. Phys. 143, No. 5, 833--854 (2011; Zbl 1244.60086)].