Occupation Time Fluctuations in Branching Systems

We consider particle systems in locally compact Abelian groups with particles moving according to a process with symmetric stationary independent increments and undergoing one and two levels of critical branching. We obtain long time fluctuation limits for the occupation time process of the one- and two-level systems. We give complete results for the case of finite variance branching, where the fluctuation limits are Gaussian random fields, and partial results for an example of infinite variance branching, where the fluctuation limits are stable random fields. The asymptotics of the occupation time fluctuations are determined by the Green potential operator G of the individual particle motion and its powers G 2,G 3, and by the growth as t- (infinity)of the operator Gt = (integral)(t 0)T(s) ds and its powers, where T t is the semigroup of the motion. The results are illustrated with two examples of motions: the symmetric (alpha) -stable Levy process in R^d (0 < (alpha) <= 2), and the so called chierarchical random walk in the hierarchical group of order N (0