Growth of stationary Hastings–Levitov

Abstract

We construct and study a stationary version of the Hastings-Levitov$(0)$ model. We prove that, unlike in the classical HL$(0)$ model, in the stationary case the size of particles attaching to the aggregate is tight, and therefore SHL$(0)$ is proposed as a potential candidate for a stationary off-lattice variant of Diffusion Limited Aggregation (DLA). The stationary setting, together with a geometric interpretation of the harmonic measure, yields new geometric results such as stabilization, finiteness of arms and arm size distribution. We show that, under appropriate scaling, arms in SHL$(0)$ converge to the graph of Brownian motion which has fractal dimension $3/2$. Moreover we show that trees with $n$ particles reach a height of order $n^{2/3}$, corresponding to a numerical prediction of Meakin from 1983 for the gyration radius of DLA growing on a long line segment.