Brunet-Derrida particle systems, free boundary problems and Wiener-Hopf equations (Q653298)

The authors consider Brunet-Derrida particle systems in \(\mathbb{R}\) with \(N\) particles which give birth independently at rate \(1\) and where after each birth the leftmost particle is erased, keeping the number of particles constant [\textit{E. Brunet} and \textit{B. Derrida}, ``Shift in the velocity of a front due to a cutoff'', Phys. Rev. E (3) 56, 2597--2604 (1997)]. When a particle at \(x\) gives birth, the new particle is sent to location \(x+y\) with \(y\) being chosen from an absolutely continuous probability distribution \(\rho(y)dy\) with \(\rho\) is symmetric and \(\int_{-\infty}^{\infty}|x|\rho(x)dx<\infty.\) It is shown that, as \(N\rightarrow \infty,\) the empirical measure process associated to the system converges in distribution to a deterministic measure-valued process whose densities solve a free boundary integro-differential equation, where traveling wave solutions correspond to solutions of Wiener-Hopf equations.