A branching random walk seen from the tip

Abstract

We show that all the time-dependent statistical properties of the rightmost points of a branching Brownian motion can be extracted from the traveling wave solutions of the Fisher-KPP equation. We show that the distribution of all the distances between the rightmost points has a long time limit which can be understood as the delay of the Fisher-KPP traveling waves when the initial condition is modified. The limiting measure exhibits the surprising property of superposability: the statistical properties of the distances between the rightmost points of the union of two realizations of the branching Brownian motion shifted by arbitrary amounts are the same as those of a single realization. We discuss the extension of our results to more general branching random walks.