This talk is based on a work jointly with Timothy Budd (Copenhagen), Nicolas Curien (Orsay) and Igor Kortchemski (Ecole Polytechnique).
Consider a self-similar Markov process $X$ on $[0,\infty)$ which converges at infinity a.s. We interpret $X(t)$ as the size of a typical cell at time $t$, and each negative jump as a birth event. More precisely, if ${\Delta}X(s) = -y < 0$, then $s$ is the birth at time of a daughter cell with size $y$ which then evolves independently and according to the same dynamics. In turn, daughter cells give birth to granddaughter cells each time they make a negative jump, and so on.
The genealogical structure of the cell population can be described in terms of a branching random walk, and this gives rise to remarkable martingales. We analyze traces of these mar- tingales in physical time, and point at some applications for self-similar growth-fragmentation processes and for planar random maps.[-]

We consider the problem of controlling the diffusion coefficient of a diffusion with constant negative drift rate such that the probability of hitting a given lower barrier up to some finite time horizon is minimized. We assume that the diffusion rate can be chosen in a progressively measurable way with values in the interval [0,1]. We prove that the value function is regular, concave in the space variable, and that it solves the associated HJB equation. To do so, we show that the heat equation on a right triangle, with a boundary condition that is discontinuous in the corner, possesses a smooth solution.
Work in Collaboration with Stefan Ankirchner, Nabil Kazi-Tani, Chao Zhou.[-]

We study a financial market in which some assets, with prices adapted w.r.t. a reference filtration F are traded. In this presentation, we shall restrict our attention to the case where F is generated by a Brownian motion. One then assumes that an agent has some extra information, and may use strategies adapted to a larger filtration G. This extra information is modeled by the knowledge of some random time $\tau$, when this time occurs. We restrict our study to a progressive enlargement setting, and we pay particular attention to honest times. Our goal is to detect if the knowledge of $\tau$ allows for some arbitrage (classical arbitrages and arbitrages of the first kind), i.e., if using G-adapted strategies, one can make profit. The results presented here are based on two joint papers with Aksamit, Choulli and Deng, in which the authors study No Unbounded Profit with Bounded Risk (NUPBR) in a general filtration F and the case of classical arbitrages in the case of honest times, density framework and immersion setting. We shall also study the information drift and the growth of an optimal portfolio resulting from that model (forthcoming work with T. Schmidt).[-]