Metastability of a random walk with catastrophes

Abstract

We consider a random walk with catastrophes which was introduced to model population biology. It is known that this Markov chain gets eventually absorbed at $0$ for all parameter values. Recently, it has been shown that this chain exhibits a metastable behavior in the sense that it can persist for a very long time before getting absorbed. In this paper we study this metastable phase by making the parameters converge to extreme values. We obtain four different limits that we believe shed light on the metastable phase.