Large deviations for the branching Brownian motion in presence of selection or coalescence

Bernard Derrida, Zhan Shi

Published 2016-01-18Version 1

The large deviation function has been known for a long time in the literature for the displacement of the rightmost particle in a branching random walk (BRW), or in a branching Brownian motion (BBM). More recently a number of generalizations of the BBM and of the BRW have been considered where selection or coalescence mechanisms tend to limit the exponential growth of the number of particles. Here we try to estimate the large deviation function of the position of the rightmost particle for several such generalizations: the $L$-BBM, the $N$-BBM, and the CBRW (coalescing branching random walk) which is closely related to the noisy FKPP equation. Our approach allows us to obtain only upper bounds on these large deviation functions. One noticeable feature of our results is their non analytic dependence on the parameters (such as the coalescence rate in the CBRW).