The Brownian web: Characterization and convergence

Abstract

The Brownian web (BW) is the random network formally consisting of the paths of coalescing one-dimensional Brownian motions starting from every space-time point in ℝ×ℝ. We extend the earlier work of Arratia and of Tóth and Werner by providing a new characterization which is then used to obtain convergence results for the BW distribution, including convergence of the system of all coalescing random walks to the BW under diffusive space-time scaling.