Lisa Hartung

We prove the convergence of the extremal processes for variable speed branching Brownian motions where the "speed functions", that describe the time-inhomogeneous variance, lie strictly below their concave hull and satisfy a certain weak regularity condition. These limiting objects are universal in the sense that they only depend on the slope of the speed function at $0$ and the final time $t$. The proof is based on previous results for two-speed BBM obtained in a recent paper of ours and uses Gaussian comparison arguments to extend these to the general case.

We construct and describe the extremal process for variable speed branching Brownian motion, studied recently by Fang and Zeitouni, for the case of piecewise constant speeds; in fact for simplicity we concentrate on the case when the speed is $\sigma_1$ for $s\leq bt$ and $\sigma_2$ when $bt\leq s\leq t$. In the case $\sigma_1>\sigma_2$, the process is the concatenation of two BBM extremal processes, as expected. In the case $\sigma_1<\sigma_2$, a new family of cluster point processes arises, that are similar, but distinctively different from the BBM process. Our proofs follow the strategy of Arguin, Bovier, and Kistler.