Construction of the Dawson-Watanabe Process
Super Brownian motion, Dawson-Watanabe process.
This dissertation aims at the construction of the Dawson-Watanabe process as a scaling limit of the branching Brownian motion, the latter being also related here to the solution of a heat equation with a source. The existence of the Dawson-Watanabe process (also called super Brownian motion or superprocess) is a consequence that this process is a solution to a martingal problem obtained through the scale limit of the branching Brownian motion. The proof follows the classic structure of tightness and uniqueness of limit points, and the uniqueness, in this followed path, results from the characterization of the Dawson-Watanabe process as a dual solution of a certain partial differential equation.