The Seneta-Heyde scaling for homogeneous fragmentations

Abstract: Homogeneous mass fragmentation processes describe the evolution of a unit mass that breaks down randomly into pieces as time. Mathematically speaking, they can be thought of as continuous-time analogues of branching random walks with non-negative displacements. Following recent developments in the theory of branching random walks, in particular the work of \cite{AShi10}, we consider the problem of the Seneta-Heyde norming of the so-called additive martingale at criticality. Aside from replicating results for branching random walks in the new setting of fragmentation processes, our main goal is to present a style of reasoning, based on $L^p$ estimates, which works for a whole host of different branching-type processes. We show that our methods apply equally to the setting of branching random walks, branching Brownian motion as well as Gaussian multiplicative chaos.