Speed and fluctuations of \(N\)-particle branching Brownian motion with spatial selection (Q343801)

Consider a branching Brownian motion on the real line with the following selection mechanism: every time the number of particles exceeds a given large number \(N\), only the \(N\) right-most particles are kept and the others are killed. The author shows that for every \(\alpha\in (0,1)\) the position of the \([\alpha N]\)-th particle in the system at time \(t \log^3 N\) converges, after suitable centering, to a spectrally positive Lévy process \((L_t)_{t\geq 0}\) with an explicitly given Lévy triple. The model studied by the author is related to the traveling waves of the noisy FKPP equation \(\partial_t u = \partial_x^2 u + u(1-u) + \sqrt{u/N}\,\dot{W}\), where \(\dot{W}\) is a space-time white noise. The behavior proved by the author is predicted to hold for a large class of models falling into the universality class of this equation, see [\textit{E. Brunet} et al., ``Phenomenological theory giving the full statistics of the position of fluctuating pulled fronts'', Phys. Rev. E 73, No. 5, Article ID 056126 (2006); \url{doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.73.056126})].