Spatial Extent of Branching Brownian Motion

DOI10.1103/PHYSREVE.91.042131arXiv1501.07693WikidataQ53505794 ScholiaQ53505794MaRDI QIDQ6258633FDOQ6258633

Authors: Kabir Ramola, Satya N. Majumdar, Grégory Schehr 

Publication date: 30 January 2015

Abstract: We study the one dimensional branching Brownian motion starting at the origin and investigate the correlation between the rightmost ($X_{max}geq0$) and leftmost ($X_{min}leq0$) visited sites up to time $t$. At each time step the existing particles in the system either diffuse (with diffusion constant $D$), die (with rate $a$) or split into two particles (with rate $b$). We focus on the regime $bleqa$ where these two extreme values $X_{max}$ and $X_{min}$ are strongly correlated. We show that at large time $t$, the joint probability distribution function (PDF) of the two extreme points becomes stationary $P(X,Y,toinfty)op(X,Y)$. Our exact results for $p(X,Y)$ demonstrate that the correlation between $X_{max}$ and $X_{min}$ is nonzero, even in the stationary state. From this joint PDF, we compute exactly the stationary PDF $p(zeta)$ of the (dimensionless) span $zeta=(X_{max}-X_{min})/sqrtD/b$, which is the distance between the rightmost and leftmost visited sites. This span distribution is characterized by a linear behavior $p(zeta)simfrac12left(1+Deltaight)zeta$ for small spans, with $Delta=left(fracab-1ight)$. In the critical case ($Delta=0$) this distribution has a non-trivial power law tail $p(zeta)sim8pisqrt3/zet{a}^3$ for large spans. On the other hand, in the subcritical case ($Delta>0$), we show that the span distribution decays exponentially as $p(zeta)sim(A^2/2)zetaexpleft(-sqrtDeltazetaight)$ for large spans, where $A$ is a non-trivial function of $Delta$ which we compute exactly. We show that these asymptotic behaviors carry the signatures of the correlation between $X_{max}$ and $X_{min}$. Finally we verify our results via direct Monte Carlo simulations.

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