The shape of the front of multidimensional branching Brownian motion (2401.12431v2)

Abstract: We study the shape of the outer envelope of a branching Brownian motion (BBM) in $\mathbb{R}^d$, $d\geq 2$. We focus on the extremal particles: those whose norm is within $O(1)$ of the maximal norm amongst the particles alive at time $t$. Our main result is a scaling limit, with exponent $3/2$, for the outer-envelope of the BBM around each extremal particle (the "front"); the scaling limit is a continuous random surface given explicitly in terms of a Bessel(3) process. Towards this end, we introduce a point process that captures the full landscape around each extremal particle and show convergence in distribution to an explicit point process. This complements the global description of the extremal process given in Berestycki et. al. (Ann. Probab. 52 (2024), no. 3, 955-982), where the local behavior at directions transversal to the radial component of the extremal particles is not addressed.