Convergence of trees with a given degree sequence and of their associated laminations

Abstract

In this paper, we study uniform rooted plane trees with given degree sequence. We show, under some natural hypotheses on the degree sequence, that these trees converge toward the so-called Inhomogeneous Continuum Random Tree after renormalisation. Our proof relies on the convergence of a modification of the well-known Lukasiewicz path. We also give a unified treatment of the limit, as the number of vertices tends to infinity, of the fragmentation process derived by cutting-down the edges of a tree with a given degree sequence, including its geometric representation by a lamination-valued process. The latter is a collection of nested laminations that are compact subsets of the unit disk made of non-crossing chords. In particular, we prove an equivalence between Gromov-weak convergence of discrete trees and the convergence of their associated lamination-valued processes.