Trajectories in random minimal transposition factorizations

Abstract

We study random typical minimal factorizations of the $n$-cycle, which are factorizations of $(1,\dots ,n)$ as a product of $n-1$ transpositions, chosen uniformly at random. Our main result is, roughly speaking, a local convergence theorem for the trajectories of finitely many points in the factorization. The main tool is an encoding of the factorization by an edge and vertex-labelled tree, which is shown to converge to Kesten's infinite Bienaymé-Galton-Watson tree with Poisson offspring distribution, uniform i.i.d. edge labels and vertex labels obtained by a local exploration algorithm.

contains 28 pages, 8 figures, incorporates referee's suggestion and uses journal formatting