A Markovian Growth Dynamics on Rooted Binary Trees Evolving According to the Gompertz Curve

Inspired by biological dynamics, we consider a growth Markov process taking values on the space of rooted binary trees, similar to the Aldous-Shields (Probab. Theory Relat. Fields 79(4):509?C542, 1988) model. Fix n??1 and ??>0. We start at time 0 with the tree composed of a root only. At any time, each node with no descendants, independently from the other nodes, produces two successors at rate ??(n?k)/n, where k is the distance from the node to the root. Denote by Z _n (t) the number of nodes with no descendants at time t and let T _n =?? ^?1 nln(n/ln4)+(ln2)/(2??). We prove that 2^?n Z _n (T _n +n??), ?????, converges to the Gompertz curve exp(?(ln2)?e ^??|? ). We also prove a central limit theorem for the martingale associated to Z _n (t).