Branching Brownian motion under soft killing

TL;DR

This paper investigates the behavior of a branching Brownian motion in a random Poissonian obstacle field with soft killing, establishing a law of large numbers for the total mass conditioned on survival.

Contribution

It introduces a model of BBM with soft killing in Poissonian obstacles and proves a quenched law of large numbers for the total mass conditioned on survival.

Findings

Positive probability of extinction due to killing in almost every environment

Law of large numbers for total mass conditioned on survival

Results hold in almost every environment with respect to the Poisson process

Abstract

We study a $d$-dimensional branching Brownian motion (BBM) among Poissonian obstacles, where a random trap field in $\mathbb{R}^d$ is created via a Poisson point process. In the soft obstacle model, the trap field consists of a positive potential which is formed as a sum of a compactly supported bounded function translated at the atoms of the Poisson point process. Particles branch at the normal rate outside the trap field; and when inside the trap field, on top of complete suppression of branching, particles are killed at a rate given by the value of the potential. Under soft killing, the probability that the entire BBM goes extinct due to killing is positive in almost every environment. Conditional on ultimate survival of the process, we prove a law of large numbers for the total mass of BBM among soft Poissonian obstacles. Our result is quenched, that is, it holds in almost every environment with respect to the Poisson point process.