Typical behavior of the harmonic measure in critical Galton-Watson trees with infinite variance offspring distribution

Abstract

We study the typical behavior of the harmonic measure in large critical Galton-Watson trees whose offspring distribution is in the domain of attraction of a stable distribution with index $\alpha\in (1,2]$. Let $\mu_n$ denote the hitting distribution of height $n$ by simple random walk on the critical Galton-Watson tree conditioned on non-extinction at generation $n$. We extend the results of arxiv:1502.05584 to prove that, with high probability, the mass of the harmonic measure $\mu_n$ carried by a random vertex uniformly chosen from height $n$ is approximately equal to $n^{-\lambda_\alpha}$, where the constant $\lambda_\alpha >\frac{1}{\alpha-1}$ depends only on the index $\alpha$. In the analogous continuous model, this constant $\lambda_\alpha$ turns out to be the typical local dimension of the continuous harmonic measure. Using an explicit formula for $\lambda_\alpha$, we are able to show that $\lambda_\alpha$ decreases with respect to $\alpha\in(1,2]$, and it goes to infinity at the same speed as $(\alpha-1)^{-2}$ when $\alpha$ approaches 1.