English

A system of grabbing particles related to Galton-Watson trees

Probability 2009-06-04 v2

Abstract

We consider a system of particles with arms that are activated randomly to grab other particles as a toy model for polymerization. We assume that the following two rules are fulfilled: Once a particle has been grabbed then it cannot be grabbed again, and an arm cannot grab a particle that belongs to its own cluster. We are interested in the shape of a typical polymer in the situation when the initial number of monomers is large and the numbers of arms of monomers are given by i.i.d. random variables. Our main result is a limit theorem for the empirical distribution of polymers, where limit is expressed in terms of a Galton-Watson tree.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0804.0726,
  title  = {A system of grabbing particles related to Galton-Watson trees},
  author = {Jean Bertoin and Vladas Sidoravicius and Maria Eulalia Vares},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0804.0726},
  year   = {2009}
}