Exponential Bounds and Analyticity for the Tree Builder Random Walk

Abstract: In this work we investigate a class of random walks that interacts with its environment called Tree Builder Random Walk (TBRW). In our settings, at each step, the walker adds a random number of vertices to its position sampled according to a distribution $Q$. Previous works showed that the walker is ballistic with a well-defined speed, and that the TBRW admits a renewal structure, meaning that the process can be split into i.i.d epochs. We show that the first renewal time has exponential tail. Moreover, we show two consequences of the light tail of the first renewal time: an exponential upper bound for the empirical speed of the walker, and, for the case in which the walker adds only one vertex with probability $p$, we show that the limiting speed is an analytic function of the parameter $p$. In some of our proofs, we apply techniques from bond percolation, which consist of extending probabilities to the complex numbers and using the Weierstrass $M$-test.