Self-repellent branching random walk

Abstract

We consider a system of particles performing a discrete-time binary branching random walk with independent standard normal increments subject to a penalty $\b$ for every pair of particles that get within distance $\e$ of each other at every time. We study the optimal configurations that minimise the sum of the spread out cost and the repulsion cost up to a given time horizon $N$. We show that at time $N$ particles are spread out over a distance $\asymp (\b\e)^{1/3} 2^{2N/3}$. We also show that the total cost of the optimal configurations up to time $N$ is $\asymp (\b\e)^{2/3} 2^{4N/3}$.