PC Seminar: Fragmentation of trees and drifted excursions

Abstract: The fragmentation of a tree is a process which consists in cutting the tree at random points, thus splitting it into smaller connected components as time passes. In the case of the so-called Brownian tree, it turns out that the sizes of these subtrees, known as the Aldous-Pitman fragmentation process, have the same distribution as the lengths of the excursions over its current infimum of a linearly drifted Brownian excursion, as proved by Bertoin. We provide a natural coupling between these two objects. To this end, we make use of the so-called cut-tree of the Brownian tree, which can be seen as the genealogical tree of the fragmentation process. Joint work with Igor Kortchemski. 

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