The minimum of a branching random walk outside the boundary case

Julien Barral, Yueyun Hu, Thomas Madaule

Published 2014-06-26, updated 2014-10-16Version 2

This paper is a complement to the studies on the minimum of a real-valued branching random walk. In the boundary case (Biggins, Kyprianou 2005), A\"{i}d\'ekon in a seminal paper (2013) obtained the convergence in law of the minimum after a suitable renormalization. We study here the situation when the log-generating function of the branching random walk explodes at some positive point and it cannot be reduced to the boundary case. In the associated thermodynamics framework this corresponds to a first order phase transition, while the boundary case corresponds to a second order phase transition.