A Strong Law of Large Numbers for Super-critical Branching Brownian Motion with Absorption

Abstract: We consider a (one-dimensional) branching Brownian motion process with a general offspring distribution having at least two moments, and in which all particles have a drift towards the origin where they are immediately absorbed. It is well-known that if and only if the branching rate is sufficiently large, then the population survives forever with positive probability. We show that throughout this super-critical regime, the number of particles inside any fixed set normalized by the mean population size converges to an explicit limit, almost surely and in $L^1$. As a consequence, we get that almost surely on the event of eternal survival, the empirical distribution of particles converges weakly to the (minimal) quasi-stationary distribution associated with the Markovian motion driving the particles. This proves a result of Kesten from 1978, for which no proof was available until now.