Convergence and Wave Propagation for a System of Branching Rank-Based Interacting Brownian Particles

Abstract: In this work we study a branching particle system of diffusion processes on the real line interacting through their rank in the system. Namely, each particle follows an independent Brownian motion, but only K $\ge$ 1 particles on the far right are allowed to branch with constant rate, whilst the remaining particles have an additional positive drift of intensity $\chi$ > 0. This is the so called Go or Grow hypothesis, which serves as an elementary hypothesis to model cells in a capillary tube moving upwards a chemical gradient. Despite the discontinuous character of the coefficients for the movement of particles and their demographic events, we first obtain the limit behavior of the population as K $\rightarrow$ $\infty$ by weighting the individuals by 1/K. Then, on the microscopic level when K is fixed, we investigate numerically the speed of propagation of the particles and recover a threshold behavior according to the parameter $\chi$ consistent with the already known behavior of the limit. Finally, by studying numerically the ancestral lineages we categorize the traveling fronts as pushed or pulled according to the critical parameter $\chi$.