We investigate the tail behavior of the first-passage time for Sinai’s random walk in a random environment. Our method relies on the connection between Sinai’s walk and branching processes with immigration in a random environment, and the analysis on some important quantities of these branching processes such as extinction time, maximum population, and total population.

In this paper, we study random walks on groups that contain superlinear-divergent geodesics, in the line of thoughts of Goldsborough and Sisto. The existence of a superlinear-divergent geodesic is a quasi-isometry invariant which allows us to execute Gouëzel’s pivoting technique. We develop the theory of superlinear divergence and establish a central limit theorem for random walks on these groups.

We consider two continuous-time generalizations of conservative random walks introduced in Englander and Volkov (2022), an orthogonal and a spherically symmetrical one; the latter model is also known as random flights. For both models, we show the transience of the walks when $d\ge 2$ and that the rate of direction changing follows a power law $t^{-\alpha}$, $0<\alpha\le 1$, or the law $(\!\ln t)^{-\beta}$ where $\beta>2$.

We present a detailed analysis of random motions moving in higher spaces with a natural number of velocities. In the case of the so-called minimal random dynamics, under some broad assumptions, we give the joint distribution of the position of the motion (for both the inner part and the boundary of the support) and the number of displacements performed with each velocity. Explicit results for cyclic and complete motions are derived. We establish useful relationships between motions moving in different spaces, and we derive the form of the distribution of the movements in arbitrary dimension. Finally, we investigate further properties for stochastic motions governed by non-homogeneous Poisson processes.

We prove that the local time of random walks conditioned to stay positive converges to the corresponding local time of three-dimensional Bessel processes by proper scaling. Our proof is based on Tanaka’s pathwise construction for conditioned random walks and the derivation of asymptotics for mixed moments of the local time.

We investigate the translation lengths of group elements that arise in random walks on the isometry groups of Gromov hyperbolic spaces. In particular, without any moment condition, we prove that non-elementary random walks exhibit at least linear growth of translation lengths. As a corollary, almost every random walk on mapping class groups eventually becomes pseudo-Anosov, and almost every random walk on $\mathrm {Out}(F_n)$ eventually becomes fully irreducible. If the underlying measure further has finite first moment, then the growth rate of translation lengths is equal to the drift, the escape rate of the random walk.

We then apply our technique to investigate the random walks induced by the action of mapping class groups on Teichmüller spaces. In particular, we prove the spectral theorem under finite first moment condition, generalizing a result of Dahmani and Horbez.

For an n-element subset U of $\mathbb {Z}^2$, select x from U according to harmonic measure from infinity, remove x from U and start a random walk from x. If the walk leaves from y when it first enters the rest of U, add y to it. Iterating this procedure constitutes the process we call harmonic activation and transport (HAT).

HAT exhibits a phenomenon we refer to as collapse: Informally, the diameter shrinks to its logarithm over a number of steps which is comparable to this logarithm. Collapse implies the existence of the stationary distribution of HAT, where configurations are viewed up to translation, and the exponential tightness of diameter at stationarity. Additionally, collapse produces a renewal structure with which we establish that the center of mass process, properly rescaled, converges in distribution to two-dimensional Brownian motion.

To characterize the phenomenon of collapse, we address fundamental questions about the extremal behavior of harmonic measure and escape probabilities. Among n-element subsets of $\mathbb {Z}^2$, what is the least positive value of harmonic measure? What is the probability of escape from the set to a distance of, say, d? Concerning the former, examples abound for which the harmonic measure is exponentially small in n. We prove that it can be no smaller than exponential in $n \log n$. Regarding the latter, the escape probability is at most the reciprocal of $\log d$, up to a constant factor. We prove it is always at least this much, up to an n-dependent factor.

In 2008, Tóth and Vető defined the self-repelling random walk with directed edges as a non-Markovian random walk on $\unicode{x2124}$: in this model, the probability that the walk moves from a point of $\unicode{x2124}$ to a given neighbor depends on the number of previous crossings of the directed edge from the initial point to the target, called the local time of the edge. Tóth and Vető found that this model exhibited very peculiar behavior, as the process formed by the local times of all the edges, evaluated at a stopping time of a certain type and suitably renormalized, converges to a deterministic process, instead of a random one as in similar models. In this work, we study the fluctuations of the local times process around its deterministic limit, about which nothing was previously known. We prove that these fluctuations converge in the Skorokhod $M_1$ topology, as well as in the uniform topology away from the discontinuities of the limit, but not in the most classical Skorokhod topology. We also prove the convergence of the fluctuations of the aforementioned stopping times.

Motivated by applications to COVID dynamics, we describe a model of a branching process in a random environment $\{Z_n\}$ whose characteristics change when crossing upper and lower thresholds. This introduces a cyclical path behavior involving periods of increase and decrease leading to supercritical and subcritical regimes. Even though the process is not Markov, we identify subsequences at random time points $\{(\tau_j, \nu_j)\}$—specifically the values of the process at crossing times, viz. $\{(Z_{\tau_j}, Z_{\nu_j})\}$—along which the process retains the Markov structure. Under mild moment and regularity conditions, we establish that the subsequences possess a regenerative structure and prove that the limiting normal distributions of the growth rates of the process in supercritical and subcritical regimes decouple. For this reason, we establish limit theorems concerning the length of supercritical and subcritical regimes and the proportion of time the process spends in these regimes. As a byproduct of our analysis, we explicitly identify the limiting variances in terms of the functionals of the offspring distribution, threshold distribution, and environmental sequences.

Let G be a real Lie group, $\Lambda <G$ a lattice and $H\leqslant G$ a connected semisimple subgroup without compact factors and with finite center. We define the notion of H-expanding measures $\mu $ on H and, applying recent work of Eskin–Lindenstrauss, prove that $\mu $-stationary probability measures on $G/\Lambda $ are homogeneous. Transferring a construction by Benoist–Quint and drawing on ideas of Eskin–Mirzakhani–Mohammadi, we construct Lyapunov/Margulis functions to show that H-expanding random walks on $G/\Lambda $ satisfy a recurrence condition and that homogeneous subspaces are repelling. Combined with a countability result, this allows us to prove equidistribution of trajectories in $G/\Lambda $ for H-expanding random walks and to obtain orbit closure descriptions. Finally, elaborating on an idea of Simmons–Weiss, we deduce Birkhoff genericity of a class of measures with respect to some diagonal flows and extend their applications to Diophantine approximation on similarity fractals to a nonconformal and weighted setting.

We derive conditions for recurrence and transience for time-inhomogeneous birth-and-death processes considered as random walks with positively biased drifts. We establish a general result, from which the earlier known particular results by Menshikov and Volkov [‘Urn-related random walk with drift $\rho x^\alpha /t^\beta $’, Electron. J. Probab. 13 (2008), 944–960] follow.

Let $S=\{p_1, \ldots , p_r,\infty \}$ for prime integers $p_1, \ldots , p_r.$ Let X be an S-adic compact nilmanifold, equipped with the unique translation-invariant probability measure $\mu .$ We characterize the countable groups $\Gamma $ of automorphisms of X for which the Koopman representation $\kappa $ on $L^2(X,\mu )$ has a spectral gap. More specifically, let Y be the maximal quotient solenoid of X (thus, Y is a finite-dimensional, connected, compact abelian group). We show that $\kappa $ does not have a spectral gap if and only if there exists a $\Gamma $-invariant proper subsolenoid of Y on which $\Gamma $ acts as a virtually abelian group,

We prove that for a vast class of random walks on a compactly generated group, the exponential growth of convolutions of a probability density function along almost every sample path is bounded by the growth of the group. As an application, we show that the almost sure and $L^1$ convergences of the Shannon–McMillan–Breiman theorem hold for compactly supported random walks on compactly generated groups with subexponential growth.

In this paper we study the asymptotic behaviour of a random uniform parking function $\pi_n$ of size n. We show that the first $k_n$ places $\pi_n(1),\ldots,\pi_n(k_n)$ of $\pi_n$ are asymptotically independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) and uniform on $\{1,2,\ldots,n\}$, for the total variation distance when $k_n = {\rm{o}}(\sqrt{n})$, and for the Kolmogorov distance when $k_n={\rm{o}}(n)$, improving results of Diaconis and Hicks. Moreover, we give bounds for the rate of convergence, as well as limit theorems for certain statistics such as the sum or the maximum of the first $k_n$ parking places. The main tool is a reformulation using conditioned random walks.

We prove that the hitting measure is singular with respect to the Lebesgue measure for random walks driven by finitely supported measures on cocompact, hyperelliptic Fuchsian groups. Moreover, the Hausdorff dimension of the hitting measure is strictly less than one. Equivalently, the inequality between entropy and drift is strict. A similar statement is proven for Coxeter groups.

In this article we introduce a simple tool to derive polynomial upper bounds for the probability of observing unusually large maximal components in some models of random graphs when considered at criticality. Specifically, we apply our method to a model of a random intersection graph, a random graph obtained through p-bond percolation on a general d-regular graph, and a model of an inhomogeneous random graph.

We prove that many, but not all, injective factors arise as crossed products by nonsingular Bernoulli actions of the group $\mathbb {Z}$. We obtain this result by proving a completely general result on the ergodicity, type and Krieger’s associated flow for Bernoulli shifts with arbitrary base spaces. We prove that the associated flow must satisfy a structural property of infinite divisibility. Conversely, we prove that all almost periodic flows, as well as many other ergodic flows, do arise as associated flow of a weakly mixing Bernoulli action of any infinite amenable group. As a byproduct, we prove that all injective factors with almost periodic flow of weights are infinite tensor products of $2 \times 2$ matrices. Finally, we construct Poisson suspension actions with prescribed associated flow for any locally compact second countable group that does not have property (T).

The Chow–Robbins game is a classical, still partly unsolved, stopping problem introduced by Chow and Robbins in 1965. You repeatedly toss a fair coin. After each toss, you decide whether you take the fraction of heads up to now as a payoff, otherwise you continue. As a more general stopping problem this reads $V(n,x) = \sup_{\tau }\mathbb{E} \left [ \frac{x + S_\tau}{n+\tau}\right]$ , where S is a random walk. We give a tight upper bound for V when S has sub-Gaussian increments by using the analogous time-continuous problem with a standard Brownian motion as the driving process. For the Chow–Robbins game we also give a tight lower bound and use these to calculate, on the integers, the complete continuation and the stopping set of the problem for $n\leq 489\,241$ .

Given a branching random walk $(Z_n)_{n\geq0}$ on $\mathbb{R}$ , let $Z_n(A)$ be the number of particles located in interval A at generation n. It is well known that under some mild conditions, $Z_n(\sqrt nA)/Z_n(\mathbb{R})$ converges almost surely to $\nu(A)$ as $n\rightarrow\infty$ , where $\nu$ is the standard Gaussian measure. We investigate its large-deviation probabilities under the condition that the step size or offspring law has a heavy tail, i.e. a decay rate of $\mathbb{P}(Z_n(\sqrt nA)/Z_n(\mathbb{R})>p)$ as $n\rightarrow\infty$ , where $p\in(\nu(A),1)$ . Our results complete those in Chen and He (2019) and Louidor and Perkins (2015).

We establish a normal approximation for the limiting distribution of partial sums of random Rademacher multiplicative functions over function fields, provided the number of irreducible factors of the polynomials is small enough. This parallels work of Harper for random Rademacher multiplicative functions over the integers.