Maximal and minimal displacement of supercritical branching random walks on free products of groups

TL;DR

This paper proves that the maximal and minimal displacement of supercritical branching random walks on free products of finite groups grow linearly, with speeds determined by large deviation rate functions, using a multitype branching process approach.

Contribution

It introduces a novel method to determine linear displacement speeds in branching random walks on free products of groups through large deviation analysis.

Findings

Maximal and minimal displacements grow linearly almost surely.

Speeds are given by intersections of large deviation rate functions with a horizontal line.

A multitype branching process is constructed to analyze particle speeds.

Abstract

We prove that the maximal and minimal displacement of branching random walks with mean offspring number $\rho>1$ on free products of finite groups grows linearly almost surely. More precisely, we establish that the linear speed for the maximal (respectively minimal) displacement is given by the largest (respectively smallest) intersection point of the large deviation rate function of the underlying random walk with the horizontal line at height $\log\rho$. The proof is based on constructing an associated multitype branching process which consists of particles that travel fast enough, and distinguishing the types via the suffix of the particles locations.