The Extremal Process of Branching Brownian Motion

Abstract

We prove that the extremal process of branching Brownian motion, in the limit of large times, converges weakly to a cluster point process. The limiting process is a (randomly shifted) Poisson cluster process, where the positions of the clusters is a Poisson process with exponential density. The law of the individual clusters is characterized as branching Brownian motions conditioned to perform "unusually large displacements", and its existence is proved. The proof combines three main ingredients. First, the results of Bramson on the convergence of solutions of the Kolmogorov-Petrovsky-Piscounov equation with general initial conditions to standing waves. Second, the integral representations of such waves as first obtained by Lalley and Sellke in the case of Heaviside initial conditions. Third, a proper identification of the tail of the extremal process with an auxiliary process, which fully captures the large time asymptotics of the extremal process. The analysis through the auxiliary process is a rigorous formulation of the cavity method developed in the study of mean field spin glasses.

31 pages, 1 figure

References in corpus (3)

• A branching random walk seen from the tip
• Statistics at the tip of a branching random walk and the delay of traveling waves
• Characterization of invariant measures at the leading edge for competing particle systems

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• An ergodic theorem for the frontier of branching Brownian motion
• An ergodic theorem for the extremal process of branching Brownian motion