Conservative random walk

Abstract

Recently, in ["The coin-turning walk and its scaling limit", Electronic Journal of Probability, 25 (2020)], the ``coin-turning walk'' was introduced on ${\mathbb Z}$. It is a non-Markovian process where the steps form a (possibly) time-inhomogeneous Markov chain. In this article, we follow up the investigation by introducing analogous processes in ${\mathbb Z}^d$, $d\ge 2$: at time $n$ the direction of the process is ``updated'' with probability $p_n$; otherwise the next step repeats the previous one. We study some of the fundamental properties of these walks, such as transience/recurrence and scaling limits. Our results complement previous ones in the literature about ``correlated'' (or ``Newtonian'') and ``persistent'' random walks.