Asymptotic height of Plancherel random trees
Abstract
We study a natural analogue of Ulam's problem for random rooted trees distributed according to a Plancherel-type measure. This probability measure is closely related to the classical Plancherel measure on integer partitions. For a Plancherel random tree with vertices, we investigate the asymptotic behavior of its height , defined as the maximal distance from the root to a leaf. We prove that this height grows logarithmically. More precisely, there is a one-parameter family of random trees indexed by such that converges in probability to , where is an explicit constant depending on the parameter . The case of Plancherel trees corresponds to the parameter . The proof is based on the fact that the Plancherel random trees can be viewed as Ewens fragmentation trees, for which the height exhibits a sharp threshold phenomenon. An upper bound is obtained via -mass functionals and contraction estimates, while the lower bound is derived by embedding the model into a branching random walk with logarithmic displacements governed by a Poisson--Dirichlet distribution. The constant is characterized through a variational principle associated with this branching random walk.
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2604.25877,
title = {Asymptotic height of Plancherel random trees},
author = {Shengjun Zhang},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2604.25877},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
73 pages, 3 figures. Comments welcome