Non-extensive condensation in reinforced branching processes

TL;DR

This paper investigates a class of branching processes with fitness-based reproduction, revealing a non-extensive condensation phenomenon where multiple families collectively form a condensate, challenging previous physics claims.

Contribution

It characterizes the asymptotic behavior of the largest family in fitness-based branching processes with bounded support, showing condensation is non-extensive and collective.

Findings

Largest family size is negligible compared to total population

Condensation is non-extensive, involving multiple families

Disproves prior physics claims about condensate formation

Abstract

We study a class of branching processes in which a population consists of immortal individuals equipped with a fitness value. Individuals produce offspring with a rate given by their fitness, and offspring may either belong to the same family, sharing the fitness of their parent, or be founders of new families, with a fitness sampled from a fitness distribution. Examples that can be embedded in this class are stochastic house-of-cards models, urn models with reinforcement, and the preferential attachment tree of Bianconi and Barabasi. Our focus is on the case when the fitness distribution has bounded support and regularly varying tail at the essential supremum. In this case there exists a condensation phase, in which asymptotically a proportion of mass in the empirical fitness distribution of the overall population condenses in the maximal fitness value. Our main results describe the asymptotic behaviour of the size and fitness of the largest family at a given time. In particular, we show that as time goes to infinity the size of the largest family is always negligible compared to the overall population size. This implies that condensation, when it arises, is non-extensive and emerges as a collective effort of several families none of which can create a condensate on its own. Our result disproves claims made in the physics literature in the context of preferential attachment trees.