Critical branching processes in random environment with immigration: survival of a single family

Abstract

We consider a critical branching process in an i.i.d. random environment, in which one immigrant arrives at each generation. We are interested in the event ${\mathcal{A}}_i(n)$ that all individuals alive at time $n$ are offspring of the immigrant which joined the population at time $i$. We study the asymptotic probability of this event when $n$ is large and $i$ follows different asymptotics which may be related to $n$ ($i$ fixed, close to $n$, or going to infinity but far from $n$). In order to do so, we establish some conditional limit theorems for random walks, which are of independent interest.