In this paper we study the time required for a @math -biased ( @math ) walk to visit all nodes of a supercritical Galton-Watson tree up to generation @math . Inspired by the extremal landscape approach in [ 2018] for simple random walk on binary trees, we establish the near-independent nature of extremal points for the @math -biased walk, and deduce the scaling limit of the cover time.
Abstract For simple random walk on a finite tree, the cover time is the time taken to visit every vertex. For the balanced b-ary tree of height m, the cover time is shown to be asymptotic to 2m 2 b m + 1 ( log b) (b − 1) as m → ∞ . On the uniform random labeled tree on n vertices, we give a convincing heuristic argument that the mean time to cover and return to the root is asymptotic to 6(2π) 1 2 n 3 2 , and prove a weak O(n 3 2 ) upper bound. The argument rests upon a recursive formula for cover time of trees generated by a simple branching process. In this paper we deal with a random walk in a random environment on a super-critical Galton–Watson tree. We focus on the recurrent cases already studied by Hu and Shi (Ann. Probab. 35:1978–1997, 2007; Probab. Theory Relat. Fields 138:521–549, 2007), (Probab. Theory Relat. Fields, 2011, in press), and Faraud (Electron. J. Probab. 16(6):174–215, 2011). We prove that the largest generation entirely visited by these walks behaves like logn, and that the constant of normalization, which differs from one case to another, is a function of the inverse of the constant of Biggins’ law of large numbers for branching random walks (Biggins in Adv. Appl. Probab. 8:446–459, 1976).