On a ternary coalescent process

We present a coalescent process where three particles merge at each coagulation step. Using a random walk representation, we prove duality with a fragmentation process, whose fragmentation law we specify explicitly. Furthermore, we give a second construction of the coalescent in terms of random binary forests and study asymptotic properties. Starting from N particles of unit mass, we obtain under an appropriate rescaling when N tends to infinity a well-known binary coalescent, the so-called standard additive coalescent.