The directed spanning forest in the hyperbolic space

Abstract

The Euclidean directed spanning forest is a random forest in ${\mathbb{R}}^{\mathit{d}}$ introduced by Baccelli and Bordenave in 2007 and we introduce and study here the analogous tree in the hyperbolic space. The topological properties of the Euclidean DSF have been stated for $\mathit{d}=2$ and conjectured for $\mathit{d}\ge 3$ (see further): it should be a tree for $\mathit{d}\in \{2,3\}$ and a countable union of disjoint trees for $\mathit{d}\ge 4$. Moreover, it should not contain bi-infinite branches whatever the dimension d. In this paper, we construct the hyperbolic directed spanning forest (HDSF) and we give a complete description of its topological properties, which are radically different from the Euclidean case. Indeed, for any dimension, the hyperbolic DSF is a tree containing infinitely many bi-infinite branches, whose asymptotic directions are investigated. The strategy of our proofs consists in exploiting the mass transport principle, which is adapted to take advantage of the invariance by isometries. Using appropriate mass transports is the key to carry over the hyperbolic setting ideas developed in percolation and for spanning forests. This strategy provides an upper-bound for horizontal fluctuations of trajectories, which is the key point of the proofs. To obtain the latter, we exploit the representation of the forest in the hyperbolic half space.