No Arabic abstract
We study the branching random walk on weighted graphs; site-breeding and edge-breeding branching random walks on graphs are seen as particular cases. We describe the strong critical value in terms of a geometrical parameter of the graph. We characterize the weak critical value and relate it to another geometrical parameter. We prove that, at the strong critical value, the process dies out locally almost surely; while, at the weak critical value, global survival and global extinction are both possible.
Given a branching random walk on a graph, we consider two kinds of truncations: by inhibiting the reproduction outside a subset of vertices and by allowing at most $m$ particles per site. We investigate the convergence of weak and strong critical parameters of these truncated branching random walks to the analogous parameters of the original branching random walk. As a corollary, we apply our results to the study of the strong critical parameter of a branching random walk restricted to the cluster of a Bernoulli bond percolation.
The reproduction speed of a continuous-time branching random walk is proportional to a positive parameter $lambda$. There is a threshold for $lambda$, which is called $lambda_w$, that separates almost sure global extinction from global survival. Analogously, there exists another threshold $lambda_s$ below which any site is visited almost surely a finite number of times (i.e.~local extinction) while above it there is a positive probability of visiting every site infinitely many times. The local critical parameter $lambda_s$ is completely understood and can be computed as a function of the reproduction rates. On the other hand, only for some classes of branching random walks it is known that the global critical parameter $lambda_w$ is the inverse of a certain function of the reproduction rates, which we denote by $K_w$. We provide here new sufficient conditions which guarantee that the global critical parameter equals $1/K_w$. This result extends previously known results for branching random walks on multigraphs and general branching random walks. We show that these sufficient conditions are satisfied by periodic tree-like branching random walks. We also discuss the critical parameter and the critical behaviour of continuous-time branching processes in varying environment. So far, only examples where $lambda_w=1/K_w$ were known; here we provide an example where $lambda_w>1/K_w$.
In this paper we prove that, under the assumption of quasi-transitivity, if a branching random walk on ${{mathbb{Z}}^d}$ survives locally (at arbitrarily large times there are individuals alive at the origin), then so does the same process when restricted to the infinite percolation cluster ${{mathcal{C}}_{infty}}$ of a supercritical Bernoulli percolation. When no more than $k$ individuals per site are allowed, we obtain the $k$-type contact process, which can be derived from the branching random walk by killing all particles that are born at a site where already $k$ individuals are present. We prove that local survival of the branching random walk on ${{mathbb{Z}}^d}$ also implies that for $k$ sufficiently large the associated $k$-type contact process survives on ${{mathcal{C}}_{infty}}$. This implies that the strong critical parameters of the branching random walk on ${{mathbb{Z}}^d}$ and on ${{mathcal{C}}_{infty}}$ coincide and that their common value is the limit of the sequence of strong critical parameters of the associated $k$-type contact processes. These results are extended to a family of restrained branching random walks, that is, branching random walks where the success of the reproduction trials decreases with the size of the population in the target site.
We study survival of nearest-neighbour branching random walks in random environment (BRWRE) on ${mathbb Z}$. A priori there are three different regimes of survival: global survival, local survival, and strong local survival. We show that local and strong local survival regimes coincide for BRWRE and that they can be characterized with the spectral radius of the first moment matrix of the process. These results are generalizations of the classification of BRWRE in recurrent and transient regimes. Our main result is a characterization of global survival that is given in terms of Lyapunov exponents of an infinite product of i.i.d. $2times 2$ random matrices.
Bernoulli random walks, a simple avalanche model, and a special branching process are essesntially identical. The identity gives alternative insights into the properties of these basic model sytems.