MaThRad and University of Extremadura collaborate on Spatial Branching Processes

MaThRad recently welcomed Pedro Martín Chávez, PhD student at the University of Extremadura, to work with the Warwick team on particle systems and measure-valued processes. 

Pedro has been working closely with Andreas Kyprianou, Emma Horton and fellow MaThRad visitor Victor Rivero, to investigate general spatial branching processes with immigration. They are focussing on establishing sufficient and necessary conditions for population stability in wide environments and developed an integral criteria to ascertain when immigrated mass compensates for population decline caused by insufficient average particle branching. Their findings, which are applicable to non-local branching Markov processes and super-processes, will be online soon. 

Looking ahead, the team will be looking to apply their insights to the field of nuclear physics and will use their findings about neutron branching processes in nuclear reactors to create a practical guideline for understanding reactor start-up dynamics. They plan to collaborate with experts from one of MaThRad’s partners the CEA (the French Alternative Energies and Atomic Energy Commission), to publish a paper useful for the nuclear engineering community.