Convergence of trees with a given degree sequence and of their associated laminations

Abstract: In this paper, we study uniform rooted plane trees with given degree sequence. We show, under some natural hypotheses on the degree sequence, that these trees converge toward the so-called Inhomogeneous Continuum Random Tree after renormalisation. Our proof relies on the convergence of a modification of the well-known Lukasiewicz path. We also give a unified treatment of the limit, as the number of vertices tends to infinity, of the fragmentation process derived by cutting-down the edges of a tree with a given degree sequence, including its geometric representation by a lamination-valued process. The latter is a collection of nested laminations that are compact subsets of the unit disk made of non-crossing chords. In particular, we prove an equivalence between Gromov-weak convergence of discrete trees and the convergence of their associated lamination-valued processes.