Paper detail

The Dirichlet random walk

In this article we define and study a stochastic process on Galoisian covers of compact manifolds. The successive positions of the process are defined recursively by picking a point uniformly in the Dirichlet domain of the previous one. We prove a theorem à la Kesten for such a process: the escape rate of the random walk is positive if and only if the cover is non amenable. We also investigate more in details the case where the deck group is Gromov hyperbolic, showing the almost sure convergence to the boundary of the trajectory as well as a central limit theorem for the escape rate