Strong law of large numbers and L log L condition for supercritical branching processes

We consider branching processes for structured populations: each individual is characterized by a type or trait which belongs to a general measurable state space.

We focus on the supercritical recurrent case, where the population may survive and grow and the trait distribution converges.

The branching process is then expected to be driven by the positive triplet of first eigenvalue problem of the first moment semigroup.

Under the assumption of convergence of the renormalized semigroup in weighted total variation norm, we prove strong convergence of the normalized empirical measure and non-degeneracy of the limiting martingale.

Convergence is obtained under an Llog L condition which provides a Kesten-Stigum result in infinite dimension and relaxes the uniform convergence assumption of the renormalized first moment semigroup required in the work of Asmussen and Hering in 1976.

The techniques of proofs combine families of martingales and contraction of semigroups and the truncation procedure of Asmussen and Hering.

We also obtain L^1 convergence of the renormalized empirical measure and contribute to unifying different results in the literature.

These results greatly extend the class of examples where a law of large numbers applies, as we illustrate it with absorbed branching diffusion, the house of cards model and some growth-fragmentation processes.