In this article, we try to give a rather complete picture of the behavior of the free energy for a model of directed polymer in a random environment, in which the polymer is a simple symmetric random walk on the lattice $\Z^d$, and the environment is a collection $\{W(t,x);t\ge 0, x\in \Z^d\}$ of i.i.d. Brownian motions.
We show that the endpoint large deviation rate function for a continuous-time directed polymer agrees with the rate function of the underlying random walk near the origin in the whole weak disorder phase.
I discuss models for a continuum directed random polymer in a disordered environment in which the polymer lives on a fractal called the \textit{diamond hierarchical lattice}, a self-similar metric space forming a network of interweaving pathways. This fractal depends on a branching parameter $b\in \mathbb{N}$ and a segmenting number $s\in \mathbb{N}$. For $s>b$ my focus is on random measures on the set of directed paths that can be formulated as a subcritical Gaussian multiplicative chaos. This path measure is analogous to the continuum directed random polymer introduced by Alberts, Khanin, Qu…
We study a polymer model on hierarchical lattices very close to the one introduced and studied in \cite{DGr, CD}. For this model, we prove the existence of free energy and derive the necessary and sufficient condition for which very strong disorder holds for all $\gb$, and give some accurate results on the behavior of the free energy at high-temperature. We obtain these results by using a combination of fractional moment method and change of measure over the environment to obtain an upper bound, and second moment method to get a lower bound. We also get lower bounds on the fluctuation exponent…
In this article, we consider two models of directed polymers in random environment: a discrete model and a continuous model. We consider these models in dimension greater or equal to 3 and we suppose that the normalized partition function is bounded in L^2. Under these assumptions, Sinai proved a local limit theorem for the discrete model, using a perturbation expansion. In this article, we give a new method for proving Sinai's local limit theorem. This new method can be transposed to the continuous setting in which we prove a similar local limit theorem.
This paper is concerned with two related types of directed polymers in a random medium. The first one is a d-dimensional Brownian motion living in a random environment which is Brownian in time and homogeneous in space. The second is a continuous-time random walk on the lattice Z^d, in a random environment with similar properties as in continuous space. The case of a space-time white noise environment can be acheived in this second setting. By means of some Gaussian tools, we estimate the free energy of these models at low temperature, and give some further information on the strong disorder r…
This paper provides information about the asymptotic behavior of a one-dimensional Brownian polymer in random medium represented by a Gaussian field $W$ on ${\mathbb{R}}_+\times{\mathbb{R}}$ which is white noise in time and function-valued in space. According to the behavior of the spatial covariance of $W$, we give a lower bound on the power growth (wandering exponent) of the polymer when the time parameter goes to infinity: the polymer is proved to be superdiffusive, with a wandering exponent exceeding any $α<3/5$.
We develop a Mellin transform framework which allows us to simultaneously analyze the four known exactly solvable 1+1 dimensional lattice polymer models: the log-gamma, strict-weak, beta, and inverse-beta models. Using this framework we prove the conjectured fluctuation exponents of the free energy and the polymer path for the stationary point-to-point versions of these four models. The fluctuation exponent for the polymer path was previously unproved for the strict-weak, beta, and inverse-beta models.
Motivated by the study of directed polymer models with random weights on the square integer lattice, we define an integrability property shared by the log-gamma, strict-weak, beta, and inverse-beta models. This integrability property encapsulates a preservation in distribution of ratios of partition functions which in turn implies the so called Burke property. We show that under some regularity assumptions, up to trivial modifications, there exist no other models possessing this property.
We consider various lattice models of polymers: lattice trees, lattice animals, and self-avoiding walks. The polymer interacts with a surface (hyperplane), receiving a unit energy reward for each site in the surface. There is an adsorption transition of the polymer at a critical value of $β$, the inverse temperature. We present a new proof of the result of Hammersley, Torrie, and Whittington (1982) that the transition occurs at a strictly positive value of $β$ when the surface is impenetrable, i.e. when the polymer is restricted to a half-space. In contrast, for a penetrable surface, it is an …
In this note we show that in any dimension $d$, the strong disorder property implies the strong localization property. This is established for a continuous time model of directed polymers in a random environment : the parabolic Anderson Model.
We introduce a framework for adsorption of a single polymer in which the topology of the polymer is quenched before adsorption, in contrast to more standard adsorption models having annealed topology. Our "topology" refers either to the precise branching structure of a branched polymer (in any dimension), or else to the knot type of a ring polymer in three dimensions. The quenched topology is chosen uniformly at random from all lattice polymers of a given size in one of four classes (lattice animals, trees, combs, or rings), and we then consider adsorption of the subclass of configurations tha…
We characterize the law of the partition function of a Brownian directed polymer model in terms of a diffusion process associated with the quantum Toda lattice. The proof is via a multidimensional generalization of a theorem of Matsumoto and Yor concerning exponential functionals of Brownian motion. It is based on a mapping which can be regarded as a geometric variant of the RSK correspondence.
We introduce the strict-weak polymer model, and show the KPZ universality of the free energy fluctuation of this model for a certain range of parameters. Our proof relies on the observation that the discrete time geometric q-TASEP model, studied earlier by A. Borodin and I. Corwin, scales to this polymer model in the limit q->1. This allows us to exploit the exact results for geometric q-TASEP to derive a Fredholm determinant formula for the strict-weak polymer, and in turn perform rigorous asymptotic analysis to show KPZ scaling and GUE Tracy-Widom limit for the free energy fluctuations. We a…
The first main goal of this article is to give a new metrization of the Mukherjee--Varadhan topology, recently introduced as a translation-invariant compactification of the space of probability measures on Euclidean spaces. This new metrization allows us to achieve our second goal which is to extend the recent program of Bates and Chatterjee on localization for the endpoint distribution of discrete directed polymers to polymers based on general random walks in Euclidean spaces. Following their strategy, we study the asymptotic behavior of the endpoint distribution update map and study the set …
We show that nontrivial bi-infinite polymer Gibbs measures do not exist in typical environments in the inverse-gamma (or log-gamma) directed polymer model on the planar square lattice. The precise technical result is that, except for measures supported on straight-line paths, such Gibbs measures do not exist in almost every environment when the weights are independent and identically distributed inverse-gamma random variables. The proof proceeds by showing that when two endpoints of a point-to-point polymer distribution are taken to infinity in opposite directions but not parallel to lattice d…
We consider the smoothed multiplicative noise stochastic heat equation $$d u_{\eps,t}= \frac 12 Δu_{\eps,t} d t+ β\eps^{\frac{d-2}{2}}\, \, u_{\eps, t} \, d B_{\eps,t} , \;\;u_{\eps,0}=1,$$ in dimension $d\geq 3$, where $B_{\eps,t}$ is a spatially smoothed (at scale $\eps$) space-time white noise, and $β>0$ is a parameter. We show the existence of a $\barβ\in (0,\infty)$ so that the solution exhibits weak disorder when $β<\barβ$ and strong disorder when $β> \barβ$. The proof techniques use elements of the theory of the Gaussian multiplicative chaos.