Branching exponential flights: travelled lengths and collision statistics

Abstract

The evolution of several physical and biological systems, ranging from neutron transport in multiplying media to epidemics or population dynamics, can be described in terms of branching exponential flights, a stochastic process which couples a Galton-Watson birth-death mechanism with random spatial displacements. Within this context, one is often called to assess the length ${\ell }_V$ that the process travels in a given region $V$ of the phase space, or the number of visits $n_V$ to this same region. In this paper, we address this issue by resorting to the Feynman-Kac formalism, which allows characterizing the full distribution of ${\ell }_V$ and $n_V$ and in particular deriving explicit moment formulas. Some other significant physical observables associated to ${\ell }_V$ and $n_V$, such as the survival probability, are discussed as well, and results are illustrated by revisiting the classical example of the rod model in nuclear reactor physics.

22 pages, 6 figures

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• The critical catastrophe revisited
• Properties of branching exponential flights in bounded domains
• Cauchy's formulas for random walks in bounded domains
• Clustering of branching Brownian motions in confined geometries
• Universal properties of branching random walks in confined geometries
• Neutron fluctuations: the importance of being delayed
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