This note sharpens the smoothing inequality of Giacomin and Toninelli for disordered polymers. This inequality is shown to be valid for any disorder distribution with locally finite exponential moments, and to provide an asymptotically sharp constant for weak disorder. A key tool in the proof is an estimate that compares the effect on the free energy of tilting, respectively, shifting the disorder distribution. This estimate holds in large generality (way beyond disordered polymers) and is of independent interest.
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 establish a second-order almost sure limit theorem for the minimal position in a one-dimensional super-critical branching random walk, and also prove a martingale convergence theorem which answers a question of Biggins and Kyprianou [9]. Our method applies furthermore to the study of directed polymers on a disordered tree. In particular, we give a rigorous proof of a phase transition phenomenon for the partition function (from the point of view of convergence in probability), already described by Derrida and Spohn [17]. Surprisingly, this phase transition phenomenon disappears in the sense …
We use a generalization of Hoeffding's inequality to show concentration results for the free energy of disordered pinning models, assuming only that the disorder has a finite exponential moment. We also prove some concentration inequalities for directed polymers in random environment, which we use to establish a large deviations results for the end position of the polymer under the polymer measure.
We consider a model for a polymer interacting with an attractive wall through a random sequence of charges. We focus on the so-called diluted limit, when the charges are very rare but have strong intensity. In this regime, we determine the quenched critical point of the model, showing that it is different from the annealed one. The proof is based on a rigorous renormalization procedure. Applications of our results to the problem of a copolymer near a selective interface are discussed.
We consider a model of directed polymers on a regular tree with a disorder given by independent, identically distributed weights attached to the vertices. For suitable weight distributions this model undergoes a phase transition with respect to its localization behaviour. We show that, for high temperatures, the free energy is supported by a random tree of positive exponential growth rate, which is strictly smaller than that of the full tree. The growth rate of the minimal supporting subtree is decreasing to zero as the temperature decreases to the critical value. At the critical value and all…
We study a directed polymer model in a random environment on infinite binary trees. The model is characterized by a phase transition depending on the inverse temperature. We concentrate on the asymptotics of the partition function in the near-critical regime, where the inverse temperature is a small perturbation away from the critical one with the perturbation converging to zero as the system size grows large. Depending on the speed of convergence we observe very different asymptotic behavior. If the perturbation is small then we are inside the critical window and observe the same decay of the…
We construct and study a family random continuum polymer measures $\mathbf{M}_{r}$ corresponding to limiting partition function laws recently derived in a weak-coupling regime of polymer models on hierarchical graphs with marginally relevant disorder. The continuum polymers, which we refer to as directed paths, are identified with isometric embeddings of the unit interval $[0,1]$ into a compact diamond fractal with Hausdorff dimension two, and there is a natural 'uniform' probability measure, $μ$, over the space of directed paths, $Γ$. Realizations of the random path measures $\mathbf{M}_{r}$ …
We study the path properties of a random polymer attracted to a defect line by a potential with disorder, and we prove that in the delocalized regime, at any temperature, the number of contacts with the defect line remains in a certain sense "tight in probability" as the polymer length varies. On the other hand we show that at sufficiently low temperature, there exists a.s. a subsequence where the number of contacts grows like the log of the length of the polymer.
We consider general disordered models of pinning of directed polymers on a defect line. This class contains in particular the $(1+1)$--dimensional interface wetting model, the disordered Poland--Scheraga model of DNA denaturation and other $(1+d)$--dimensional polymers in interaction with flat interfaces. We consider also the case of copolymers with adsorption at a selective interface. Under quite general conditions, these models are known to have a (de)localization transition at some critical line in the phase diagram. In this work we prove in particular that, as soon as disorder is present, …
In this note we establish several inequalities and monotonicity properties for the free energy of directed polymers under certain stochastic orders: the usual stochastic order, the Laplace transform order and the convex order. For the latter our results cover also many classical disordered systems.
We study the question of how the competition between $\textit{bulk disorder}$ and a $\textit{localized microscopic defect}$ affects the macroscopic behavior of a system in the directed polymer context at the free energy level. We consider the directed polymer model on a disordered $d$-ary tree and represent the localized microscopic defect by modifying the disorder distribution at each vertex in a single path (branch), or in a subtree, of the tree. The polymer must choose between following the microscopic defect and finding the best branches through the bulk disorder. We describe three possibl…
In this paper, we study a model of directed polymers in random environment, where the environment is restricted to a time-space tube whose spatial width grows polynomially with time. It can be viewed as an interpolation between the disordered pinning model and the classic directed polymer model. We prove weak coupling limits for the directed polymer partition functions in such tube environments in all dimensions, as the inverse temperature vanishes at a suitable rate. As the tube width varies, transitions between regimes of disorder irrelevance, marginal relevance and disorder relevance are ob…
These notes are devoted to the statistical mechanics of directed polymers interacting with one-dimensional spatial defects. We are interested in particular in the situation where frozen disorder is present. These polymer models undergo a localization/delocalization transition. There is a large (bio)-physics literature on the subject since these systems describe, for instance, the statistics of thermally created loops in DNA double strands and the interaction between (1+1)-dimensional interfaces and disordered walls. In these cases the transition corresponds, respectively, to the DNA denaturati…
We consider a model for a directed polymer in a random environment defined on a hierarchical diamond lattice in which i.i.d. random variables are attached to the lattice bonds. Our focus is on scaling schemes in which a size parameter $n$, counting the number of hierarchical layers of the system, becomes large as the inverse temperature $β$ vanishes. When $β$ has the form $\widehatβ/\sqrt{n}$ for a parameter $\widehatβ>0$, we show that there is a cutoff value $0 < κ< \infty$ such that as $n \to \infty$ the variance of the normalized partition function tends to zero for $\widehatβ\leq κ$ and gr…
A copolymer is a chain of repetitive units (monomers) that are almost identical, but they differ in their degree of affinity for certain solvents. This difference leads to striking phenomena when the polymer fluctuates in a nonhomogeneous medium, for example, made of two solvents separated by an interface. One may observe, for instance, the localization of the polymer at the interface between the two solvents. A discrete model of such system, based on the simple symmetric random walk on $\mathbb {Z}$, has been investigated in [Bolthausen and den Hollander, Ann. Probab. 25 (1997), 1334-1366], n…
We consider disordered systems of directed polymer type, for which disorder is so-called marginally relevant. These include the usual (short-range) directed polymer model in dimension (2+1), the long-range directed polymer model with Cauchy tails in dimension (1+1) and the disordered pinning model with tail exponent 1/2. We show that in a suitable weak disorder and continuum limit, the partition functions of these different models converge to a universal limit: a log-normal random field with a multi-scale correlation structure, which undergoes a phase transition as the disorder strength varies…
We analyze the localized phase of a general model of a directed polymer in the proximity of an interface that separates two solvents. Each monomer unit carries a charge, $ω_n$, that determines the type (attractive or repulsive) and the strength of its interaction with the solvents. In addition, there is a polymer--interface interaction and we want to model the case in which there are impurities $\tildeω_n$, that we call again charges, at the interface. The charges are distributed in an in--homogeneous fashion along the chain and at the interface: more precisely the model we consider is of quen…
Inspired by recent work of Alberts, Khanin and Quastel, we formulate general conditions ensuring that a sequence of multi-linear polynomials of independent random variables (called polynomial chaos expansions) converges to a limiting random variable, given by a Wiener chaos expansion over the d-dimensional white noise. A key ingredient in our approach is a Lindeberg principle for polynomial chaos expansions, which extends earlier work of Mossel, O'Donnell and Oleszkiewicz. These results provide a unified framework to study the continuum and weak disorder scaling limits of statistical mechanics…
This dissertation develops, for several families of statistical mechanical and random growth models, techniques for analyzing infinite-volume asymptotics. In the statistical mechanical setting, we focus on the low-temperature phases of spin glasses and directed polymers, wherein the ensembles exhibit localization which is physically phenomenological. We quantify this behavior in several ways and establish connections to properties of the limiting free energy. We also consider two popular zero-temperature polymer models, namely first- and last-passage percolation. For these random growth models…
The Ma-Dasgupta real-space renormalization methods allow to study disordered systems which are governed by strong disorder fixed points. After a general introduction to the qualitative ideas and to the quantitative renormalization rules, we describe the explicit exact results that can be obtained in various one-dimensional models, either classical or quantum, either for dynamics or statics. The main part of this dissertation is devoted to statistical physics models, with special attention to (i) the off-equilibrium dynamics of a particle diffusing in a Brownian potential or in a trap landscape…
We consider directed polymer models involving multiple non-intersecting random walks moving through a space-time disordered environment in one spatial dimension. For a single random walk, Alberts, Khanin and Quastel proved that under intermediate disorder scaling (in which time and space are scaled diffusively, and the strength of the environment is scaled to zero in a critical manner) the polymer partition function converges to the solution to the stochastic heat equation with multiplicative white noise. In this paper we prove the analogous result for multiple non-intersecting random walks st…
Disordered systems are an important class of models in statistical mechanics, having the defining characteristic that the energy landscape is a fixed realization of a random field. Examples include various models of glasses and polymers. They also arise in other areas, like fitness models in evolutionary biology. The ground state of a disordered system is the state with minimum energy. The system is said to be chaotic if a small perturbation of the energy landscape causes a drastic shift of the ground state. We present a rigorous theory of chaos in disordered systems that confirms long-standin…
