Critical Branching Random Walks with Small Drift

Abstract

We study critical branching random walks (BRWs) $U^{(n)}$ on~$\mathbb{Z}_{+}$ where for each $n$, the displacement of an offspring from its parent has drift~$2\beta/\sqrt{n}$ towards the origin and reflection at the origin. We prove that for any~$\alpha>1$, conditional on survival to generation~$[n^{\alpha}]$, the maximal displacement is asymptotically equivalent to $(\alpha-1)/(4\beta)\sqrt{n}\log n$. We further show that for a sequence of critical BRWs with such displacement distributions, if the number of initial particles grows like~$yn^{\alpha}$ for some $y>0$ and $\alpha>1$, and the particles are concentrated in~$[0,O(\sqrt{n})],$ then the measure-valued processes associated with the BRWs, under suitable scaling converge to a measure-valued process, which, at any time~$t>0,$ distributes its mass over~$\mathbb{R}_+$ like an exponential distribution.