Homogeneous fragmentation processes

Abstract

The purpose of this work is to define and study homogeneous fragmentation processes in continuous time, which are meant to describe the evolution of an object that breaks down randomly into pieces as time passes. Roughly, we show that the dynamics of such a fragmentation process are determined by some exchangeable measure on the set of partitions of ℕ, and result from the combination of two different phenomena: a continuous erosion and sudden dislocations. In particular, we determine the class of fragmentation measures which can arise in this setting, and investigate the evolution of the size of the fragment that contains a point picked at random at the initial time.