Barycentric Brownian Bees

Abstract

We establish an invariance principle for the barycenter of a Brunet-Derrida particle system in $d$ dimensions. The model consists of $N$ particles undergoing dyadic branching Brownian motion with rate $1$. At a branching event, the number of particles is kept equal to $N$ by removing the particle located furthest away from the barycenter. To prove the invariance principle, a key step is to establish Harris recurrence for the process viewed from its barycenter.