Cutting down trees with a Markov chainsaw

International audienceWe provide simplified proofs for the asymptotic distribution of the number of cuts required to cut down a Galton--Watson tree with critical, finite-variance offspring distribution, conditioned to have total progeny n. Our proof is based on a coupling which yields a precise, non-asymptotic distributional result for the case of uniformly random rooted labeled trees (or, equivalently, Poisson Galton--Watson trees conditioned on their size). Our approach also provides a new, random reversible transformation between Brownian excursion and Brownian bridge