Large-displacement statistics of the rightmost particle of the one-dimensional branching Brownian motion

Abstract: Consider a one-dimensional branching Brownian motion, and rescale the coordinate and time so that the rates of branching and diffusion are both equal to $1$. If $X_1(t)$ is the position of the rightmost particle of the branching Brownian motion at time $t$, the empirical velocity $c$ of this rightmost particle is defined as $c=X_1(t)/t$. Using the Fisher-KPP equation, we evaluate the probability distribution ${\mathcal P(c,t)}$ of this empirical velocity $c$ in the long time $t$ limit for $c > 2$. It was already known that, for a single seed particle, ${\mathcal P(c,t)} \sim \exp \,[-(c^2/4-1)t]$ up to a prefactor that can depend on $c$ and $t$. Here we show how to determine this prefactor. The result can be easily generalized to the case of multiple seed particles and to branching random walks associated to other traveling wave equations.