In this paper, we introduce a model of Brownian polymer in a continuous random environment. The asymptotic behavior of the partition function associated to this polymer measure is studied, and we are able to separate a weak and strong disorder regime under some reasonable assumptions on the spatial covariance of the environment. Some further developments, concerning some concentration inequalities for the partition function, are given for the weak disorder regime.
We study a continuum model of directed polymer in random environment. The law of the polymer is defined as the Brownian motion conditioned to survive among space-time Poissonian disasters. This model is well-studied in the positive temperature regime. However, at zero-temperature, even the existence of the free energy has not been proved. In this article, we prove that the free energy exists and is continuous at zero-temperature.
In this article, we derive strong localization results for directed polymers in random environment. We show that at "low temperature" the polymer measure is asymptotically concentrated at a few points of macroscopic mass (we call these points epsilon-atoms). These results are derived assuming weak conditions on the tail decay of the random environment.
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…
Recently, Bauke and Mertens conjectured that the local statistics of energies in random spin systems with discrete spin space should, in most circumstances, be the same as in the random energy model. We show that this conjecture holds true as well for directed polymers in random environment. We also show that, under certain conditions, this conjecture holds for directed polymers even if energy levels that grow moderately with the volume of the system are considered.
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 consider two directed polymer models in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) universality class: the O'Connell-Yor semi-discrete directed polymer with boundary sources and the continuum directed random polymer with (m,n)-spiked boundary perturbations. The free energy of the continuum polymer is the Hopf-Cole solution of the KPZ equation with the corresponding (m,n)-spiked initial condition. This new initial condition is constructed using two semi-discrete polymer models with independent bulk randomness and coupled boundary sources. We prove that the limiting fluctuations of the free energies resca…
This paper provides information about the asymptotic behavior of a one-dimensional Brownian polymer in random medium represented by a space-time Gaussian field W assumed to be white noise in time and function-valued in space. According to the behavior of the spatial covariance 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 study a model of directed polymers with an exponentially recurrent Markov chain and an indefinitely divisible random environment. We prove that the normalized partition function converges exponentially fast towards zero at all temperatures.
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.
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 $α<3/5$.
In this note we give upper bounds for the free energy of discrete polymers in random media. The bounds are given by the so-called generalized multiplicative cascades from the statistical theory of turbulence. For the polymer model, we derive that the quenched free energy is different from the annealed one in dimension 1, for any finite temperature and general environment. This implies localization of the polymer.
Several authors have studied convergence in distribution to the Brownian web under diffusive scaling of Markovian random walks. In a paper by R. Roy, K. Saha and A. Sarkar, convergence to the Brownian web is proved for a system of coalescing random paths -- the Random Directed Forest -- which are not Markovian. Paths in the Random Directed Forest do not cross each other before coalescence. Here we study a generalization of the non-Markovian Random Directed Forest where paths can cross each other and prove convergence to the Brownian web. This provides an example of how the techniques to prove …
We consider the convergence of partition functions and endpoint density for the half-space directed polymer model in dimension $1+1$ in the intermediate disorder regime as considered for the full space model by Alberts, Khanin and Quastel in [AKQ]. By scaling the inverse temperature like $βn^{-1/4}$, the point-to-point partition function converges to the chaos series for the solution to stochastic heat equation with Robin boundary condition and delta initial data. We also apply our convergence results to the exact-solvable log-gamma directed polymer model in a half-space.
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…
For a directed polymer model in random environment, a characterization of the weak disorder phase in terms of the moment of the renormalized partition function has been proved in [S. Junk: Communications in Mathematical Physics 389, 1087-1097 (2022)]. We extend this characterization to a large class of unbounded environments which includes many commonly used distributions.
We give sharp estimate for the free energy of directed polymers in random environment in dimension 1+1. This estimate was known for a Gaussian environment, we extend it to the case where the law of the environment is infinitely divisible.
This paper presents a new, short proof of the computation of the upper tail large deviation rate function for the Brownian directed percolation model. Through a distributional equivalence between the last passage time in this model and the largest eigenvalue in a random matrix drawn from the Gaussian Unitary Ensemble, this provides a new proof a previously known result. The method leads to associated results for the stationary Brownian directed percolation model which have not been observed before.
We study the free energy and its relevant quantity for the directed polymer in random environment. The polymer is allowed to make unbounded jumps and the environment is given by the Bernoulli variables. We first establish the concentration of the ground state energy of polymer at zero temperature. Secondly, we also prove the same property of the free energy at finite temperature. In the proof, we use the fact that the maximum jump of any polymer nearly minimizing energy is not too large with high probability. This is an interesting property itself from the first passage percolation viewpoint.
We study the long-range directed polymer model on $\mathbbm{Z}$ in a random environment, where the underlying random walk lies in the domain of attraction of an $α$-stable process for some $α\in(0,2]$. Similar to the more classic nearest-neighbor directed polymer model, as the inverse temperature $β$ increases, the model undergoes a transition from a weak disorder regime to a strong disorder regime. We extend most of the important results known for the nearest-neighbor directed polymer model on $\mathbbm{Z}^d$ to the long-range model on $\mathbbm{Z}$. More precisely, we show that in the entire…
The sequence of random probability measures $ν_n$ that gives a path of length $n$, $\unsur{n}$ times the sum of the random weights collected along the paths, is shown to satisfy a large deviations principle with good rate function the Legendre transform of the free energy of the associated directed polymer in a random environment. Consequences on the asymptotics of the typical number of paths whose collected weight is above a fixed proportion are then drawn.
We consider a model of the shape of a growing polymer introduced by Durrett and Rogers (Probab. Theory Related Fields 92 (1992) 337--349). We prove their conjecture about the asymptotic behavior of the underlying continuous process $X_t$ (corresponding to the location of the end of the polymer at time $t$) for a particular type of repelling interaction function without compact support.
We consider the stationary O'Connell-Yor model of semi-discrete directed polymers in a Brownian environment in the intermediate disorder regime and show convergence of the increments of the log-partition function to the energy solutions of the stochastic Burgers equation. The proof does not rely on the Cole-Hopf transform and avoids the use of spectral gap estimates for the discrete model. The key technical argument is a second-order Boltzmann-Gibbs principle.
We estimate the mean first time, called the mean rotation time (MRT), for a planar random polymer to wind around a point. This polymer is modeled as a collection of n rods, each of them being parameterized by a Brownian angle. We are led to study the sum of i.i.d. imaginary exponentials with one dimensional Brownian motions as arguments. We find that the free end of the polymer satisfies a novel stochastic equation with a nonlinear time function. Finally, we obtain an asymptotic formula for the MRT, whose leading order term depends on the square root of n and, interestingly, depends weakly on …
We study the large-time behavior of the charged-polymer Hamiltonian $H_n$ of Kantor and Kardar [Bernoulli case] and Derrida, Griffiths, and Higgs [Gaussian case], using strong approximations to Brownian motion. Our results imply, among other things, that in one dimension the process $\{H_{[nt]}\}_{0\le t\le 1}$ behaves like a Brownian motion, time-changed by the intersection local-time process of an independent Brownian motion. Chung-type LILs are also discussed.
We consider random walk in a space-time random potential, also known as directed random polymer measures, on the planar square lattice with nearest-neighbor steps and general i.i.d. weights on the vertices. We construct covariant cocycles and use them to prove new results on existence, uniqueness/non-uniqueness, and asymptotic directions of semi-infinite polymer measures (solutions to the Dobrushin-Lanford-Ruelle equations). We also prove non-existence of covariant or deterministically directed bi-infinite polymer measures. Along the way, we prove almost sure existence of Busemann function lim…
We present in this paper the construction of a continuum directed polymer model in an environment given by space-time Lévy noise. One of the main objectives of this construction is to describe the scaling limit of discrete directed polymer in an heavy-tail environment and for this reason we put special emphasis on the case of $α$-stable noises with $α\in (1,2)$. Our construction can be performed in arbitrary dimension, provided that the Lévy measure satisfies specific (and dimension dependent) conditions. We also discuss a few basic properties of the continuum polymer and the relation between …
We prove the scaling relation chi = 2 xi - 1 between the transversal exponent xi and the fluctuation exponent chi for directed polymers in a random environment in d dimensions. The definition of these exponents is similar to that proposed by S. Chatterjee in first-passage percolation. The proof presented here also establishes the relation in the zero temperature version of the model, known as last-passage percolation.
We show that the weak disorder phase for the directed polymer model in a bounded random environment is characterized by the integrability of the running supremum $\sup_{n\in \mathbb N}W_n^β$ of the associated martingale $(W_n^β)_{n\in \mathbb N}$. Using this characterization, we prove that $(W_n^β)_{n\in \mathbb N}$ is $L^p$-bounded in the whole weak disorder phase, for some $p>1$. The argument generalizes to non-negative martingales with a certain product structure.
We study the directed polymer model for general graphs (beyond $\mathbb Z^d$) and random walks. We provide sufficient conditions for the existence or non-existence of a weak disorder phase, of an $L^2$ region, and of very strong disorder, in terms of properties of the graph and of the random walk. We study in some detail (biased) random walk on various trees including the Galton Watson trees, and provide a range of other examples that illustrate counter-examples to intuitive extensions of the $\mathbb Z^d$/SRW result.
In this paper, we consider directed polymers in random environment with discrete space and time. For transverse dimension at least equal to 3, we prove that diffusivity holds for the path in the full weak disorder region, i.e., where the partition function differs from its annealed value only by a non-vanishing factor. Deep inside this region, we also show that the quenched averaged energy has fluctuations of order 1. In complete generality (arbitrary dimension and temperature), we prove monotonicity of the phase diagram in the temperature.
The objective of the present paper is to establish exponential large deviation inequalities, and to use them to show exponential concentration inequalities for the free energy of a polymer in general random environment, its rate of convergence, and an expression of its limit value in terms of those of some multiplicative cascades.
In this paper, we consider four integrable models of directed polymers for which the free energy is known to exhibit KPZ fluctuations. A common framework for the analysis of these models was introduced in our recent work on the O'Connell-Yor polymer. We derive estimates for the central moments of the partition function, of any order, on the near-optimal scale $N^{1/3+ε}$, using an iterative method. Among the innovations exploiting the invariant structure, we develop formulas for correlations between functions of the free energy and the boundary weights that replace the Gaussian integration by …
We study the directed polymers in random environment on an infinite graph $G=(V,E)$ on which the underlying random walk satisfies sub-Gaussian heat kernel bounds with spectral dimension $d_{s}$ strictly less than two. Our goal in this paper is to show (i) the existence and the coincidence of the quenched and the annealed free energy $F_q(β)$, $F_a(β)$ and (ii) that $F_a(β)-F_q(β)$ is comparable to $β^{\frac{4}{2-d_{s}}}$ for small inverse temperature $β$.
We consider the model of directed polymers in a random environment introduced by Petermann : the random walk is $\mathbb{R}^d$-valued and has independent gaussian $N(0,I_d)$-increments, and the random media is a stationary centred Gaussian process $(g(k,x), k \geq 1, x \in \mathbb{R}^d)$ with covariance matrix $cov(g(i,x),g(j,y))=δ_{ij} Γ(x-y) ,$ where $Γ$ is a bounded integrable function on $\mathbb{R}^d .$ For this model, we establish an upper bound of the volume exponent in all dimensions $d$.
We study the Cauchy directed polymer model on $\mathbb{Z}^{1+1}$, where the underlying random walk is in the domain of attraction to the $1$-stable law. We show that, if the random walk satisfies certain regularity assumptions and its symmetrized version is recurrent, then the free energy is strictly negative at any inverse temperature $β>0$. Moreover, under additional regularity assumptions on the random walk, we can identify the sharp asymptotics of the free energy in the high temperature limit, namely, \begin{equation*} \lim\limits_{β\to0}β^{2}\log(-p(β))=-c. \end{equation*}
We consider the behavior of the quantity $p(β)$; the free energy of directed polymers in random environment in $1+2$ dimension, where $β$ is inverse temperature. We know that the free energy is strictly negative when $β$ is not zero. In this paper, we will prove that $p(β)$ is bounded from above by $-\exp\left( -\frac{c_\varepsilon}{β^{2+\varepsilon}} \right)$ for small $β$, where $c_\varepsilon>0$ is a constant depending on $\varepsilon>0$. Also, we will suggest a strategy to get a sharper asymptotics.
The model of Brownian Percolation has been introduced as an approximation of discrete last-passage percolation models close to the axis. It allowed to compute some explicit limits and prove fluctuation theorems for these, based on the relations between the Brownian percolation and random matrices. Here, we present two approaches that allow to treat discrete asymmetric models of directed polymers. In both cases, the behaviour is universal, meaning that the results do not depend on the precise law of the environment as long as it satisfies some natural moment assumptions. First, we establish an …
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.
The two-dimensional directed spanning forest (DSF) introduced by Baccelli and Bordenave is a planar directed forest whose vertex set is given by a homogeneous Poisson point process $\mathcal{N}$ on $\mathbb{R}^2$. If the DSF has direction $-e_y$, the ancestor $h(u)$ of a vertex $u \in \mathcal{N}$ is the nearest Poisson point (in the $L_2$ distance) having strictly larger $y$-coordinate. This construction induces complex geometrical dependencies. In this paper we show that the collection of DSF paths, properly scaled, converges in distribution to the Brownian web (BW). This verifies a conjectu…
We prove that the free energy of directed polymer in Bernoulli environment converges to the growth rate for the number of open paths in super-critical oriented percolation as the temperature tends to zero. Our proof is based on rate of convergence results which hold uniformly in the temperature. We also prove that the convergence rate is locally uniform in the percolation parameter inside the super-critical phase, which implies that the growth rate depends continuously on the percolation parameter.
We consider directed random polymers in $(d+1)$ dimensions with nearly gamma i.i.d. disorder. We study the partition function $Z_{N,ω}$ and establish exponential concentration of $\log Z_{N,ω}$ about its mean on the subgaussian scale $\sqrt{N/\log N}$ . This is used to show that $\mathbb{E}[ \log Z_{N,ω}]$ differs from $N$ times the free energy by an amount which is also subgaussian (i.e. $o(\sqrt{N})$), specifically $O(\sqrt{\frac{N}{\log N}}\log \log N)$.
We study the ergodic theory of stationary directed nearest-neighbor polymer models on $\mathbb Z^2$, with i.i.d. weights. Such models are equivalent to specifying a stationary distribution on the space of weights and correctors that satisfy certain consistency conditions. We show that for prescribed weight distribution and corrector mean, there is at most one stationary polymer distribution which is ergodic under the $e_1$ or $e_2$ shift. Further, if the weights have more than two moments and the corrector mean vector is an extreme point of the superdifferential of the limiting free energy, th…
We consider two models of random diffusion in random environment in two dimensions. The first example is the self-repelling Brownian polymer, this describes a diffusion pushed by the negative gradient of its own occupation time measure (local time). The second example is a diffusion in a fixed random environment given by the curl of massless Gaussian free field. In both cases we show that the process is superdiffusive: the variance grows faster than linearly with time. We give lower and upper bounds of the order of t log log t, respectively, t log t. We also present computations for an anisotr…
We consider the discrete directed polymer model with i.i.d. environment and we study the fluctuations of the tail $n^{(d-2)/4}(W_\infty - W_n)$ of the normalized partition function. It was proven by Comets and Liu, that for sufficiently high temperature, the fluctuations converge in distribution towards the product of the limiting partition function and an independent Gaussian random variable. We extend the result to the whole $L^2$-region, which is predicted to be the maximal high-temperature region where the Gaussian fluctuations should occur under the considered scaling. To do so, we manage…
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 prove a formula conjectured in O'Connell and Yor (2001) for the free energy density of a directed polymer in a Brownian environment in 1+1 dimensions.
We prove a central limit theorem for the winding number of a directed polymer on a cylinder, which is equivalent with proving the Gaussian fluctuations of the endpoint of the directed polymer in a spatial periodic environment.
We consider tightness for families of non-colliding Brownian bridges above a hard wall, which are subject to geometrically growing self-potentials of tilted area type. The model is introduced in order to mimic level lines of $2+1$ discrete Solid-On-Solid random interfaces above a hard wall.
We prove tightness and limiting Brownian-Gibbs description for line ensembles of non-colliding Brownian bridges above a hard wall, which are subject to geometrically growing self-potentials of tilted area type. Statistical properties of the resulting ensemble are very different from that of non-colliding Brownian bridges without self-potentials. The model itself was introduced in order to mimic level lines of (2+1)-dimensional discrete Solid-On-Solid random interfaces above a hard wall.
It is a well-known open problem in the literature on random polymers to show that a directed polymer in random environment localizes around a favorite path at low temperature. A precise statement of this conjecture is formulated and proved in this article.
We consider the Brownian directed polymer in Poissonian environment in dimension 1+1, under the so-called intermediate disorder regime, which is a crossover regime between the strong and weak disorder regions. We show that, under a diffusive scaling involving different parameters of the system, the renormalized point-to-point partition function of the polymer converges in law to the solution of the stochastic heat equation with Gaussian multiplicative noise. The Poissonian environment provides a natural setting and strong tools, such as the Wiener-Ito chaos expansion, which, applied to the par…
We study the scaling exponents of a 1+1-dimensional directed polymer in a Brownian random environment introduced by O'Connell and Yor. For a version of the model with boundary conditions that are stationary in a space-time sense we identify the exact values of the exponents. For the version without the boundary conditions we get the conjectured upper bounds on the exponents.
