Branching exponential flights: travelled lengths and collision statistics

Abstract

The evolution of several physical and biological systems, ranging from neutron transport in multiplying media to epidemics or population dynamics, can be described in terms of branching exponential flights, a stochastic process which couples a Galton–Watson birth–death mechanism with random spatial displacements. Within this context, one is often called to assess the length ℓV that the process travels in a given region V of the phase space, or the number of visits nV to this same region. In this paper, we address this issue by resorting to the Feynman–Kac formalism, which allows characterizing the full distribution of ℓV and nV and in particular deriving explicit moment formulas. Some other significant physical observables associated to ℓV and nV, such as the survival probability, are discussed as well, and results are illustrated by revisiting the classical example of the rod model in nuclear reactor physics.