Abstract. We consider a class of branching-selection particle systems on R similar to the one considered by E. Brunet and B. Derrida in their 1997 paper "Shift in the velocity of a front due to a cutoff". Based on numerical simulations and heuristic arguments, Brunet and Derrida showed that, as the population size N of the particle system goes to infinity, the asymptotic velocity of the system converges to a limiting value at the unexpectedly slow rate (log N ) −2 . In this paper, we give a rigorous mathematical proof of this fact, for the class of particle systems we consider. The proof makes use of ideas and results by R. Pemantle, and by N. Gantert, Y. Hu and Z. Shi, and relies on a comparison of the particle system with a family of N independent branching random walks killed below a linear space-time barrier.

We introduce a topology T on the space U of uniformly discrete subsets of the Euclidean space. Assume that S in U admits a unique autocorrelation measure. The diffraction measure of S is purely atomic if and only if S is almost periodic in (U, T ). This result relates idealized quasicrystals to almost periodicity. In the context of ergodic point processes, the autocorrelation measure is known to exist. Then, the diffraction measure is purely atomic if and only if the dynamical system has a pure point spectrum. As an illustration, we study deformed model sets.

We consider the Poisson Boolean model of continuum percolation. We show that there is a subcritical phase if and only if E(R d ) is finite, where R denotes the radius of the balls around Poisson points and d denotes the dimension. We also give related results concerning the integrability of the diameter of subcritical clusters.

Abstract. We prove that a wide class of Markov models of neighbor-dependent substitution processes on the integer line is solvable. This class contains some models of nucleotidic substitutions recently introduced and studied empirically by molecular biologists. We show that the polynucleotidic frequencies at equilibrium solve some finite-size linear systems. This provides, for the first time up to our knowledge, explicit and algebraic formulas for the stationary frequencies of non degenerate neighbor-dependent models of DNA substitutions. Furthermore, we show that the dynamics of these stochastic processes and their distribution at equilibrium exhibit some stringent, rather unexpected, independence properties. For example, nucleotidic sites at distance at least three evolve independently, and all the sites, when only encoded as purines and pyrimidines, evolve independently.