The Exact Asymptotic of the Time to Collision

Abstract

In this note we consider the time of the collision $\tau$ for $n$ independent copies of Markov processes $X^1_t,. . .,X^n_t$, each starting from $x_i$,where $x_1 <. . .< x_n$. We show that for the continuous time random walk $P_{x}(\tau > t) = t^{-n(n-1)/4}(Ch(x)+o(1)),$ where $C$ is known and $h(x)$ is the Vandermonde determinant. From the proof one can see that the result also holds for $X_t$ being the Brownian motion or the Poisson process. An application to skew standard Young tableaux is given.