Cross-Multiplicative Coalescent Processes and Applications.

We introduce and analyze a novel type of coalescent processes called cross-multiplicative coalescent that models a system with two types of particles, $A$ and $B$. The bonds are formed only between the pairs of particles of opposite types with the same rate for each bond, producing connected components made of particles of both types. We analyze and solve the Smoluchowski coagulation system of equations obtained as a hydrodynamic limit of the corresponding Marcus-Lushnikov process. We establish that the cross-multiplicative kernel is a gelling kernel, and find the gelation time. As an application, we derive the limiting mean length of a minimal spanning tree on a complete bipartite graph $K_{\alpha[n], \beta[n]}$ with partitions of sizes $\alpha[n]=\alpha n +o(\sqrt{n})$ and $\beta[n]=\beta n +o(\sqrt{n})$ and independent edge weights, distributed uniformly over $[0, 1]$.