The Brownian web (BW), which developed from the work of Arratia and then T{o}th and Werner, is a random collection of paths (with specified starting points) in one plus one dimensional space-time that arises as the scaling limit of the discrete web (
DW) of coalescing simple random walks. Two recently introduced extensions of the BW, the Brownian net (BN) constructed by Sun and Swart, and the dynamical Brownian web (DyBW) proposed by Howitt and Warren, are (or should be) scaling limits of corresponding discrete extensions of the DW -- the discrete net (DN) and the dynamical discrete web (DyDW). These discrete extensions have a natural geometric structure in which the underlying Bernoulli left or right arrow structure of the DW is extended by means of branching (i.e., allowing left and right simultaneously) to construct the DN or by means of switching (i.e., from left to right and vice-versa) to construct the DyDW. In this paper we show that there is a similar structure in the continuum where arrow direction is replaced by the left or right parity of the (1,2) space-time points of the BW (points with one incoming path from the past and two outgoing paths to the future, only one of which is a continuation of the incoming path). We then provide a complete construction of the DyBW and an alternate construction of the BN to that of Sun and Swart by proving that the switching or branching can be implemented by a Poissonian marking of the (1,2) points.
The dynamical discrete web (DyDW),introduced in recent work of Howitt and Warren, is a system of coalescing simple symmetric one-dimensional random walks which evolve in an extra continuous dynamical time parameter tau. The evolution is by independen
t updating of the underlying Bernoulli variables indexed by discrete space-time that define the discrete web at any fixed tau. In this paper, we study the existence of exceptional (random) values of tau where the paths of the web do not behave like usual random walks and the Hausdorff dimension of the set of exceptional such tau. Our results are motivated by those about exceptional times for dynamical percolation in high dimension by H{a}ggstrom, Peres and Steif, and in dimension two by Schramm and Steif. The exceptional behavior of the walks in the DyDW is rather different from the situation for the dynamical random walks of Benjamini, H{a}ggstrom, Peres and Steif. For example, we prove that the walk from the origin S^tau_0 violates the law of the iterated logarithm (LIL) on a set of tau of Hausdorff dimension one. We also discuss how these and other results extend to the dynamical Brownian web, the natural scaling limit of the DyDW.
