Condensation in subcritical Cauchy Bienaym\'e trees

Abstract

The goal of this note is to study the geometry of large size-conditioned Bienaym\'e trees whose offspring distribution is subcritical, belongs to the domain of attraction of a stable law of index $\alpha=1$ and satisfies a local regularity assumption. We show that a condensation phenomenon occurs: one unique vertex of macroscopic degree emerges, and its height converges in distribution to a geometric random variable. Furthermore, the height of such trees grows logarithmically in their size. Interestingly, the behavior of subcritical Bienaym\'ee trees with $\alpha=1$ is quite similar to the case $\alpha \in( 1,2]$, in contrast with the critical case. This completes the study of the height of heavy-tailed size-conditioned Bienaym\'e trees. Our approach is to check that a random-walk one-big-jump principle due to Armend\'ariz & Loulakis holds, by using local estimates due to Berger, combined with the previous approach to study subcritical Bienaym\'e trees with $\alpha>1$.