Asymptotics of one-dimensional forest fire processes

Abstract

We consider the so-called one-dimensional forest fire process. At each site of $\mathbb{Z}$, a tree appears at rate $1$. At each site of $\mathbb{Z}$, a fire starts at rate $\lambda >0$, immediately destroying the whole corresponding connected component of trees. We show that when $\lambda$ is made to tend to $0$ with an appropriate normalization, the forest fire process tends to a uniquely defined process, the dynamics of which we precisely describe. The normalization consists of accelerating time by a factor $\log (1/\lambda )$ and of compressing space by a factor $\lambda \log (1/\lambda )$. The limit process is quite simple: it can be built using a graphical construction and can be perfectly simulated. Finally, we derive some asymptotic estimates (when $\lambda \to 0$) for the cluster-size distribution of the forest fire process.

Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AOP524 the Annals of Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aop/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)

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