A nonergodic flow rule with Galton–Watson stationary measure

A flow rule assigns to every infinite rooted tree a unit flow from the root to infinity, consistently with passage to the subtrees of the children of the root, and it defines a Markov chain on the space of trees that moves from a tree to the subtree of a child chosen according to the flow. Lyons, Pemantle and Peres showed that the chain is ergodic when a stationary measure absolutely continuous with respect to a Galton–Watson measure $\mathrm{GW}$ exists and the flow is positive on every child, and asked whether a flow rule with a stationary measure equivalent to $\mathrm{GW}$ must give an ergodic chain. It need not. For the Galton–Watson measure with offspring distribution $p_2=3/5$, $p_3=2/5$ there is a flow rule for which $\mathrm{GW}$ itself is stationary and the stationary chain has an invariant event of probability $1/2$. The rule follows a colouring of the vertices that is a measurable function of the tree, in which a vertex with two children takes the AND of their colours and a vertex with three children the OR: the flow is spread evenly over the children that have the colour of the root. The two colour classes give the ergodic decomposition of the chain.

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Publication Details

Journal
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Published
2026-11-08
DOI
https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.24069932
Primary Topic
Stochastic processes and statistical mechanics
Type
preprint
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preprint

A nonergodic flow rule with Galton–Watson stationary measure

Yitzchak Shmalo
Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Stochastic processes and statistical mechanics
preprint

A nonergodic flow rule with Galton–Watson stationary measure

Yitzchak Shmalo
preprint en

Abstract

A flow rule assigns to every infinite rooted tree a unit flow from the root to infinity, consistently with passage to the subtrees of the children of the root, and it defines a Markov chain on the space of trees that moves from a tree to the subtree of a child chosen according to the flow. Lyons, Pemantle and Peres showed that the chain is ergodic when a stationary measure absolutely continuous with respect to a Galton–Watson measure $\mathrm{GW}$ exists and the flow is positive on every child, and asked whether a flow rule with a stationary measure equivalent to $\mathrm{GW}$ must give an ergodic chain. It need not. For the Galton–Watson measure with offspring distribution $p_2=3/5$, $p_3=2/5$ there is a flow rule for which $\mathrm{GW}$ itself is stationary and the stationary chain has an invariant event of probability $1/2$. The rule follows a colouring of the vertices that is a measurable function of the tree, in which a vertex with two children takes the AND of their colours and a vertex with three children the OR: the flow is spread evenly over the children that have the colour of the root. The two colour classes give the ergodic decomposition of the chain.

Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research)
Hebrew University of Jerusalem (IL)
Stochastic processes and statistical mechanics
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