The size of random fragmentation trees

Abstract

We study a random fragmentation process and its associated random tree. The process has earlier been studied by Dean and Majumdar (J. Phys. A: Math. Gen., vol. 35, L501--L507), who found a phase transition: the number of fragmentations is asymptotically normal in some cases but not in others, depending on the position of roots of a certain characteristic equation. This parallels the behaviour of discrete analogues with various random trees that have been studied in computer science. We give rigorous proofs of this phase transition, and add further details. The proof uses the contraction method. We extend some previous results for recursive sequences of random variables to families of random variables with a continuous parameter; we believe that this extension has independent interest.