An Elementary Proof of Hawkes's Conjecture on Galton-Watson Trees

In 1981, J. Hawkes conjectured the exact form of the Hausdorff gauge function for the boundary of supercritical Galton-Watson trees under a certain assumption on the tail at the infinity of the total mass of the branching measure. Hawkes's conjecture has been proved by T. Watanabe in 2007 as well as other other precise results on fractal properties of the boundary of Galton-Watson trees. The goal of this paper is to provide an elementary proof of Hawkes's conjecture under a less restrictive assumption than in T. Watanabe's paper, by use of size-biased Galton-Watson trees introduced by Lyons, Pemantle and Peres in 1995

Thermal conductivity of semiconductor superlattices: Experimental study of interface scattering

We present thermal conductivity measurements performed in three short-period (GaAs)_9(AlAs)_5 superlattices. The samples were grown at different temperatures, leading to different small scale roughness and broadening of the interfaces. The cross-plane conductivity is measured with a differential 3w method, at room temperature. The order of magnitude of the overall thermal conductivity variation is consistent with existing theoretical models, although the actual variation is smaller than expected

Decomposition of Levy trees along their diameter

We study the diameter of L{\'e}vy trees that are random compact metric spaces obtained as the scaling limits of Galton-Watson trees. L{\'e}vy trees have been introduced by Le Gall and Le Jan (1998) and they generalise Aldous' Continuum Random Tree (1991) that corresponds to the Brownian case. We first characterize the law of the diameter of L{\'e}vy trees and we prove that it is realized by a unique pair of points. We prove that the law of L{\'e}vy trees conditioned to have a fixed diameter r $\in$ (0, $\infty$) is obtained by glueing at their respective roots two independent size-biased L{\'e}vy trees conditioned to have height r/2 and then by uniformly re-rooting the resulting tree; we also describe by a Poisson point measure the law of the subtrees that are grafted on the diameter. As an application of this decomposition of L{\'e}vy trees according to their diameter, we characterize the joint law of the height and the diameter of stable L{\'e}vy trees conditioned by their total mass; we also provide asymptotic expansions of the law of the height and of the diameter of such normalised stable trees, which generalises the identity due to Szekeres (1983) in the Brownian case