Renewal theory with fat tailed distributed sojourn times: typical versus rare

Abstract

Renewal processes with heavy-tailed power law distributed sojourn times are commonly encountered in physical modelling and so typical fluctuations of observables of interest have been investigated in detail. To describe rare events the rate function approach from large deviation theory does not hold and new tools must be considered. Here we investigate the large deviations of the number of renewals, the forward and backward recurrence time, the occupation time, and the time interval straddling the observation time. We show how non-normalized densities describe these rare fluctuations, and how moments of certain observables are obtained from these limiting laws. Numerical simulations illustrate our results showing the deviations from arcsine, Dynkin, Darling-Kac, L{\'e}vy and Lamperti laws.