Fluctuations for the number of records on subtrees of the Continuum Random Tree

Abstract

We study the asymptotic behavior af the number of cuts $X(T_n)$ needed to isolate the root in a rooted binary random tree $T_n$ with $n$ leaves. We focus on the case of subtrees of the Continuum Random Tree generated by uniform sampling of leaves. We elaborate on a recent result by Abraham and Delmas, who showed that $X(T_n)/\sqrt{2n}$ converges a.s. towards a Rayleigh-distributed random variable $\Theta$, which gives a continuous analog to an earlier result by Janson on conditioned, finite-variance Galton-Watson trees. We prove a convergence in distribution of $n^{-1/4}(X(T_n)-\sqrt{2n}\Theta)$ towards a random mixture of Gaussian variables. The proofs use martingale limit theory for random processes defined on the CRT, related to the theory of records of Poisson point processes.