Universality for catalytic equations and fully parked trees

Abstract

We show that critical parking trees conditioned to be fully parked converge in the scaling limits towards the Brownian growth-fragmentation tree, a self-similar Markov tree different from Aldous' Brownian tree recently introduced and studied by Bertoin, Curien and Riera. As a by-product of our study, we prove that positive non-linear polynomial equations involving a catalytic variable display a universal polynomial exponent $5/2$ at their singularity, confirming a conjecture by Chapuy, Schaeffer and Drmota & Hainzl. Compared to previous analytical works on the subject, our approach is probabilistic and exploits an underlying random walk hidden in the random tree model.