A new combinatorial representation of the additive coalescent

The standard additive coalescent starting with n particles is a Markov process which owns several combinatorial representations, one by Pitman as a process of coalescent forests, and one by Chassaing & Louchard as the block sizes in a parking scheme. In the coalescent forest representation, some edges are added successively between a random node and a random root. In this paper, we investigate an alternative construction by adding edges between the roots. This construction induces the same process at the level of cluster sizes, but allows one to make numerous connections with some combinatorial and probabilistic models that were not known to be connected with additive coalescent. The variety of the combinatorial objects involved here – size biased percolation, parking scheme in a tree, increasing trees, random cuts of trees – justifies our interests in this Acknowledgement : The research has been supported by ANR-14-CE25-0014 (ANR GRAAL).