A necessary and sufficient condition for noncertain extinction of a branching process in a random environment (BPRE)

It is known that a branching process in a random environment (BPRE) which is subcritical or critical either dies with probability one or, in the trivial case, corresponds to an immortal sterile population. In the supercritical case, various conditions are known to be necessary for noncertain extinction while other conditions are known to be sufficient. In this paper, a necessary and sufficient condition for noncertain extinction of a supercritical BPRE is given. In particular, it is shown that a supercritical BPRE has noncertain extinction if and only if there exists a random truncation, depending only on the environmental sequence, such that the truncated BPRE is supercritical and such that the sequence of truncation points grows more slowly than any exponential sequence.