# Wave propagation for reaction-diffusion equations on infinite random trees

## TL;DR

This paper analyzes wavefront speeds in reaction-diffusion equations on infinite random trees, revealing how randomness in tree structure slows wave propagation and connecting it to multi-skewed Brownian motion and large deviations theory.

## Contribution

It introduces a novel approach to quantify wavefront speeds on random trees using a projection onto multi-skewed Brownian motion and large deviations analysis.

## Key findings

- Wavefront emerges when reaction rate is sufficiently large.
- Wave speed is slower than on the real line, quantified by tree structure.
- Connection established between wave propagation and large deviations of multi-skewed Brownian motion.

## Abstract

The asymptotic wave speed for FKPP type reaction-diffusion equations on a class of infinite random metric trees are considered. We show that a travelling wavefront emerges, provided that the reaction rate is large enough. The wavefront travels at a speed that can be quantified via a variational formula involving the random branching degrees $\vec{d}$ and the random branch lengths $\vec{\ell}$ of the tree. This speed is slower than that of the same equation on the real line $\mathbb{R}$, and we estimate this slow down in terms of $\vec{d}$ and $\vec{\ell}$. Our key idea is to project the Brownian motion on the tree onto a one-dimensional axis along the direction of the wave propagation. The projected process is a multi-skewed Brownian motion, introduced by Ramirez [Multi-skewed Brownian motion and diffusion in layered media, Proc. Am. Math. Soc., Vol. 139, No. 10, pp.3739-3752, 2011], with skewness and interface sets that encode the metric structure $(\vec{d}, \vec{\ell})$ of the tree. Combined with analytic arguments based on the Feynman-Kac formula, this idea connects our analysis of the wavefront propagation to the large deviations principle (LDP) of the multi-skewed Brownian motion with random skewness and random interface set. Our LDP analysis involves delicate estimates for an infinite product of $2\times 2$ random matrices parametrized by $\vec{d}$ and $\vec{\ell}$ and for hitting times of a random walk in random environment. By exhausting all possible shapes of the LDP rate function (action functional), the analytic arguments that bridge the LDP and the wave propagation overcome the random drift effect due to multi-skewness.