Branching Brownian motion conditioned on small maximum

Abstract

We consider a standard binary branching Brownian motion on the real line. It is known that the maximal position $M_t$ among all particles alive at time $t$, shifted by $m_t = \sqrt{2} t - \frac{3}{2\sqrt{2}} \log t$ converges in law to a randomly shifted Gumbel variable. Derrida and Shi (2017) conjectured the precise asymptotic behaviour of the corresponding lower deviation probability $\mathbb{P}(M_t \leq \sqrt{2}\alpha t)$ for $\alpha < 1$. We verify their conjecture, and describe the law of the branching Brownian motion conditioned on having a small maximum.