Central limit theorem for the range of critical branching random walk

Abstract: In this paper, we study second order fluctuations for the size of the range of a critical branching random walk (BRW) in $\mathbb Z^d$. We consider the BRW with geometric offspring indexed by the Kesten tree, and show that the size of its range has linear variance when $d>8$, and satisfies a central limit theorem (CLT) with Gaussian limiting distribution when $d>16$. The proof relies on the stationarity of the model under depth-first exploration, a general CLT by Dedecker and Merlevède [7], a truncation technique exploiting the local independence of tree structures, and a recursion argument for moment bounds.