Monday 14th November 2011 – 14:15 to 15:15

Speaker: Nicholas Fournier (Université Paris Est)

We consider the forest fire process on Z: on each site, seeds and matches fall at random, according to some independent Poisson processes. When a seed falls on a vacant site, a tree immediately grows. When a match falls on an occupied site, a fire destroys immediately the corresponding occupied connected component. We are interested in the asymptotics of rare fires. We prove that, under space/time re-scaling, the process converges (as matches become rarer and rarer) to a limit forest fire process.

Next, we consider the more general case where seeds and matches fall according to some independent stationary renewal processes (not necessarily Poisson). According to the tail distribution of the law of the delay between two seeds (on a given site), there are 4 possible scaling limits.

We finally introduce some related coagulation-fragmentation equations, of which the stationary distribution can be more or less explicitely computed and of which we study the scaling limit.

Part of the Stochastic Analysis Seminar Series