ORTHOGONAL POLYNOMIALS ON ℝ⁺ AND BIRTH-DEATH PROCESSES WITH KILLING

The purpose of this paper is to extend some results of Karlin and McGregor's and Chihara's concerning the three-terms recurrence relation for polynomials orthogonal with respect to a measure on the nonnegative real axis. Our findings are relevant for the analysis of a type of Markov chains known as birth-death processes with killing.