The structure of the local time of Markov processes indexed by Lévy trees

Abstract We construct an additive functional playing the role of the local time—at a fixed point x —for Markov processes indexed by Lévy trees. We start by proving that Markov processes indexed by Lévy trees satisfy a special Markov property which can be thought as a spatial version of the classical Markov property. Then, we construct our additive functional by an approximation procedure and we characterize the support of its Lebesgue-Stieltjes measure. We also give an equivalent construction in terms of a special family of exit local times. Finally, combining these results, we show that the points at which the Markov process takes the value x encode a new Lévy tree and we construct explicitly its height process. In particular, we recover a recent result of Le Gall concerning the subordinate tree of the Brownian tree where the subordination function is given by the past maximum process of Brownian motion indexed by the Brownian tree.