Universal Persistence for Local Time of One-dimensional Random Walk

Abstract

We prove the power law decay $p(t,x) \sim t^{-\phi(x,b)/2}$ in which $p(t,x)$ is the probability that the fraction of time up to $t$ in which a random walk $S$ of i.i.d. zero-mean increments taking finitely many values, is non-negative, exceeds $x$ throughout $s \in [1,t]$. Here $\phi(x,b)= \mathbb{P}(\text{L\'evy}(1/2,\kappa(x,b))<0)$ for $\kappa(x,b) = \frac{\sqrt{1-x} b - \sqrt{1+x}}{\sqrt{1-x} b + \sqrt{1+x}}$ and $b=b_S \geq 0$ measuring the asymptotic asymmetry between positive and negative excursions of the walk (with $b_s=1$ for symmetric increments).