Genealogy for supercritical branching processes

Abstract

We study the genealogy of so-called immortal branching processes, i.e. branching processes where each individual upon death is replaced by at least one new individual, and conclude that their marginal distributions are compound geometric. The result also implies that the limiting distributions of properly scaled supercritical branching processes are compound geometric. We exemplify our results with an expression for the marginal distribution for a class of branching processes that have recently appeared in the theory of coalescent processes and continuous stable random trees. The limiting distribution can be expressed in terms of the Fox H-function, and in special cases by the Meijer G-function. © Applied Probability Trust 2006.