Branching Brownian motion with generation-dependent diffusivity and nonlocal partial differential equations

Abstract

We study a voting model on a branching Brownian motion process on $\mathbb{R}$ in which the diffusivity of each child particle is increased from that of the parent by a factor of $\gamma>1$. The probability distribution of the overall vote is given in terms of the solution to a nonlocal nonlinear PDE. We exhibit conditions on the nonlinearity such that the long-time behavior of the distribution undergoes a phase transition in $\gamma$. If $\gamma$ is sufficiently large, then the long-time distribution converges to uniform. If $\gamma$ is close enough to $1$, then the long-time distribution depends in a nontrivial way on the location of the initial particle. The limiting dependence is given by a steady-state solution to the nonlocal PDE. Our study gives a probabilistic interpretation of a class of semilinear nonlocal PDEs. Interestingly, while the PDE are nonlocal, the underlying random process does not require any non-local interactions.