English

Elephant random walks on infinite Cayley trees

Probability 2026-04-15 v3 Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

We introduce a generalisation of Sch\"{u}tz and Trimper's elephant random walk to finitely generated groups. We focus on the simplest non-abelian setting, i.e. groups whose Cayley graphs are homogeneous trees of degree d3d \ge 3. We show that the asymptotic speed of the walk does not depend on the memory parameter p[0,1)p \in [0, 1) and equals d2d\frac{d - 2}{d}, the asymptotic speed of simple random walk on these graphs. We also establish upper bounds on the rate of convergence to the limiting speed. These upper bounds depend on pp and exhibit a phase transition at the critical value pd=d+12dp_d = \frac{d + 1}{2d}. Numerical experiments suggest that these upper bounds are tight. Along the way, we also obtain estimates on the return probability.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2509.03048,
  title  = {Elephant random walks on infinite Cayley trees},
  author = {Soumendu Sundar Mukherjee},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2509.03048},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

21 pages, 4 figures; in this version, we have improved several estimates; Open Problem 2.2 on the exponential decay of the return probability has now been solved by Peres and Qin in a recent preprint (available at arXiv:2604.07227); we have kept this open problem in the current version for reference purposes

R2 v1 2026-07-01T05:18:47.743Z