Universal properties of branching random walks in confined geometries

Clélia de Mulatier, Alain Mazzolo, Andrea Zoia

Published 2014-05-13Version 1

Characterizing the occupation statistics of a radiation flow through confined geometries is key to such technological issues as nuclear reactor design and medical diagnosis. This amounts to assessing the distribution of the travelled length $\ell$ and the number of collisions $n$ performed by the underlying stochastic transport process, for which remarkably simple Cauchy-like formulas were established in the case of branching Pearson random walks with exponentially distributed jumps. In this Letter, we show that such formulas strikingly carry over to the much broader class of branching processes with arbitrary jumps, provided that scattering is isotropic and the average jump size is finite.