The genealogy of branching Brownian motion with absorption

Functional limit theorems; invariance principles (60F17) Gaussian processes (60G15) Brownian motion (60J65) Branching processes (Galton-Watson, birth-and-death, etc.) (60J80)

Abstract: We consider a system of particles which perform branching Brownian motion with negative drift and are killed upon reaching zero, in the near-critical regime where the total population stays roughly constant with approximately N particles. We show that the characteristic time scale for the evolution of this population is of order

(l o g N)^{3}

, in the sense that when time is measured in these units, the scaled number of particles converges to a variant of Neveu's continuous-state branching process. Furthermore, the genealogy of the particles is then governed by a coalescent process known as the Bolthausen-Sznitman coalescent. This validates the nonrigorous predictions by Brunet, Derrida, Muller and Munier for a closely related model.

Review text

The purpose of the paper is to provide rigorous versions of some conjectures which come from the works of \textit{E. Brunet} et al. [``Noisy traveling waves: effect of selection on genealogies , Europhys. Lett. 76, No. 1, 1--7 (2006; \url{doi:10.1209/epl/i2006-10224-4}); ``Effect of selection on ancestry: an exactly soluble case and its phenomenological generalization, Phys. Rev. E (3) 76, No. 4, 041104, 20 p. (2007; \url{doi:10.1103/PhysRevE.76.041104})] and concerning the effect of natural selection on the genealogy of a population. In the present paper, the authors consider a system of particles which perform branching Brownian motion with negative drift and are killed upon reaching zero, in the near-critical regime where the total population stays roughly constant with approximately \(N\) particles. They focus on understanding the genealogy of a sample from the population after a large time. It is shown that the time to the most recent common ancestor of a sample behaves like \((\log)^3\). Moreover, the authors identify the limiting geometry of the coalescence tree of a sample, which (as shown in the paper) is governed by a coalescent process known as the Bolthausen-Sznitman coalescent.

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