Growth-fragmentation processes and bifurcators

Abstract

Markovian growth-fragmentation processes introduced by Bertoin model a system of growing and splitting cells in which the size of a typical cell evolves as a Markov process $X$ without positive jumps. We find that two growth-fragmentation processes associated respectively with two processes $X$ and $Y$ (with different laws) may have the same distribution, if $(X,Y)$ is a bifurcator, roughly speaking, which means that they coincide up to a bifurcation time and then evolve independently. Using this criterion, we deduce that the law of a self-similar growth-fragmentation is determined by a cumulant function $\kappa$ and its index of self-similarity.