Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-thermal-and-statistical-physics-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2021/section-b/6/c/solution

For this radial random walk on a regular tree, the drawing is an infinite regular tree of degree , not a planar lattice with closed loops. The radial coordinate is the number of edges in the unique path to the root. A non-root vertex has one neighbour inward and neighbours outward, so equal probabilities for its edges give
Let be radial distance measured in edge units. For , probability arriving in shell comes from shell by an outward step or from shell by an inward step:
This has precisely the same bulk master equation as the one-dimensional biased random walk, with
The outward bias is geometric: beyond the first shell, the number of vertices is , so there are more outward than inward choices even though no edge direction is dynamically preferred. is the probability summed over an entire shell, not the probability at one specified vertex; no additional shell-size factor belongs in the boxed recurrence.
The equality concerns the evolution equation away from the root, not equality to the unrestricted full-line binomial distribution at all positions. The root imposes a different boundary rule.

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