Abstract: Starting from a sequence regarded as a walk through some set of values, we consider the associated loop-erased walk as a sequence of directed edges, with an edge from to if the loop erased walk makes a step from to . We introduce a coloring of these edges by painting edges with a fixed color as long as the walk does not loop back on itself, then switching to a new color whenever a loop is erased, with each new color distinct from all previous colors. The pattern of colors along the edges of the loop-erased walk then displays stretches of consecutive steps of the walk left untouched by the loop-erasure process. Assuming that the underlying sequence generating the loop-erased walk is a sequence of independent random variables, each uniform on , we condition the walk to start at and stop the walk when it first reaches the subset , for some . We relate the distribution of the random length of this loop-erased walk to the distribution of the length of the first loop of the walk, via Cayley's enumerations of trees, and via Wilson's algorithm. For fixed and , and , let denote the event that the loop-erased walk from to has or more edges, and the and of these edges are colored differently. We show that given that the loop-erased random walk has edges for some , the events for are independent, with the probability of equal to . This determines the distribution of the sequence of random lengths of differently colored segments of the loop-erased walk, and yields asymptotic descriptions of these random lengths as .
