On extreme events for non-spatial and spatial branching Brownian motions

Abstract

We study the impact of having a non-spatial branching mechanism with infinite variance on some parameters (height, width and first hitting time) of an underlying Bienaymé–Galton–Watson branching process. Aiming at providing a comparative study of the spread of an epidemics whose dynamics is given by the modulus of a branching Brownian motion (BBM) we then consider spatial branching processes in dimension d, not necessarily integer. The underlying branching mechanism is either a binary branching model or one presenting infinite variance. In particular we evaluate the chance p(x) of being hit if the epidemics started away at distance x. We compute the large x tail probabilities of this event, both when the branching mechanism is regular and when it exhibits very large fluctuations.