Kingman's coalescent and Brownian motion

J. Berestycki, N. Berestycki

Published 2009-04-09Version 1

We describe a simple construction of Kingman's coalescent in terms of a Brownian excursion. This construction is closely related to, and sheds some new light on, earlier work by Aldous and Warren. Our approach also yields some new results: for instance, we obtain the full multifractal spectrum of Kingman's coalescent. This complements earlier work on Beta-coalescents by the authors and Schweinsberg. Surprisingly, the thick part of the spectrum is not obtained by taking the limit as $\alpha \to 2$ in the result for Beta-coalescents mentioned above. Other analogies and differences between the case of Beta-coalescents and Kingman's coalescent are discussed.