Escape regimes of biased random walks on Galton–Watson trees

Abstract

We study biased random walk on subcritical and supercritical Galton– Watson trees conditioned to survive in the transient, sub-ballistic regime. By considering offspring laws with infinite variance, we extend previously known results for the walk on the supercritical tree and observe new trapping phenomena for the walk on the subcritical tree which, in this case, always yield sub-ballisticity. This is contrary to the walk on the supercritical tree which always has some ballistic phase. © The Author(s) 2017.