Sinai's walk can be thought of as a random walk on $\mathbb {Z}$ with random potential $V$, with $V$ weakly converging under diffusive rescaling to a two-sided Brownian motion. We consider here the generator $\mathbb {L}_N$ of Sinai's walk on $[-N,N]\cap \mathbb {Z}$ with Dirichlet conditions on $-N,N$. By means of potential theory, for each $h>0$, we show the relation between the spectral properties of $\mathbb {L}_N$ for eigenvalues of order $o(\exp(-h\sqrt{N}))$ and the distribution of the $h$-extrema of the rescaled potential $V_N(x)\equiv V(Nx)/\sqrt{N}$ defined on $[-1,1]$. Information about the $h$-extrema of $V_N$ is derived from a result of Neveu and Pitman concerning the statistics of $h$-extrema of Brownian motion. As first application of our results, we give a proof of a refined version of Sinai's localization theorem.
We give an alternative proof of the localization of Sinai's random walk in random environment under weaker hypothesis than the ones used by Sinai. Moreover we give estimates that are stronger than the one of Sinai on the localization neighborhood and on the probability for the random walk to stay inside this neighborhood.
We consider Sinai's walk in i.i.d. random scenery and focus our attention on a conjecture of Révész \cite{r05} concerning the upper limits of Sinai's walk in random scenery when the scenery is bounded from above. A close study of the competition between the concentration property for Sinai's walk and negative values for the scenery enables us to prove that the conjecture is true if the scenery has "thin" negative tails and is false otherwise.
We consider Sinai's random walk in random environment. We prove that for an interval of time [1,n] Sinai's walk sojourns in a small neighborhood of the point of localization for the quasi totality of this amount of time. Moreover the local time at the point of localization normalized by $n$ converges in probability to a well defined random variable of the environment.
We consider Sinai's random walk in random environment. We prove that the logarithm of the local time is a good estimator of the random potential associated to the random environment. We give a constructive method allowing us to built the random environment from a single trajectory of the random walk.
Using the generators, we establish a connection between the Sinai's random walk and the so-called Brox process. We first find the Dirichlet form of the Brox diffusion, and then prove that it is the limit of the Dirichlet form of the Sinai's random walk. This also gives a natural way to connect between the Brox diffusion and the Brownian motion.
We consider Sinai's random walk in random environment. We prove that infinitely often (i.o.) the size of the concentration neighborhood of this random walk is almost surely bounded. As an application we get that i.o. the maximal distance between two favorite sites is almost surely bounded.
We identify the limit of the internal DLA cluster generated by Sinai's walk as the law of a functional of a Brownian motion which turns out to be a new interpretation of the Arcsine law.
We prove that the local times of a sequence of Sinai's random walks convergence to those of Brox's diffusion by proper scaling, which is accord with the result of Seignourel (2000). Our proof is based on the convergence of the branching processes in random environment by Kurtz (1979).
Sinai's random walk in random environment shows interesting patterns on the exponential time scale. We characterize the patterns that appear on infinitely many time scales after appropriate rescaling (a functional law of iterated logarithm). The curious rate function captures the difference between one-sided and two-sided behavior.
We are interested in Sinai's walk $(S\_n)\_{n\in\mathbb{N}}$. We prove that the annealed probability that $\sum\_{k=0}^n f(S\_k)$ is strictly positive for all $n\in[1,N]$ is equal to $1/(\log N)^{\frac{3-\sqrt{5}}{2}+o(1)}$, for a large class of functions $f$, and in particular for $f(x)=x$. The persistence exponent $\frac{3-\sqrt{5}}{2}$ first appears in a non-rigorous paper of Le Doussal, Monthus and Fischer, with motivations coming from physics. The proof relies on techniques of localization for Sinai's walk and uses results of Cheliotis about the sign changes of the bottom of valleys of a …
Sinai's walk is a recurrent one-dimensional nearest-neighbor random walk in random environment. It is known for a phenomenon of strong localization, namely, the walk spends almost all time at or near the bottom of deep valleys of the potential. Our main result shows a weakness of this localization phenomenon: with probability one, the zones where the walk stays for the most time can be far away from the sites where the walk spends the most time. In particular, this gives a negative answer to a problem of Erdős and Révész [Mathematical Structures--Computational Mathematics--Mathematical Modelli…
We study in this short note aging properties of Sinai's (nearest neighbour) random walk in random environment. With $\PP^o$ denoting the annealed law of the RWRE $X_n$, our main result is a full proof of the following statement due to P. Le Doussal, C. Monthus and D. S. Fisher: $$\lim_{η\to0} \lim_{n\to\infty} \PP^o (\frac{|X_{n^h} - X_n|}{(\log n)^2} < η) = \frac{1}{h^2} [ {5/3} - {2/3} e^{-(h-1)} ]. $$
We prove that the upward ladder height subordinator $H$ associated to a real valued Lévy process $ξ$ has Laplace exponent $ϕ$ that varies regularly at $\infty$ (resp. at 0) if and only if the underlying Lévy process $ξ$ satisfies Sinai's condition at 0 (resp. at $\infty$). Sinai's condition for real valued Lévy processes is the continuous time analogue of Sinai's condition for random walks. We provide several criteria in terms of the characteristics of $ξ$ to determine whether or not it satisfies Sinai's condition. Some of these criteria are deduced from tail estimates of the Lévy measure of $…
We investigate the hydrodynamical behavior of a system of random walks with zero-range interactions moving in a common `Sinai-type' random environment on a one dimensional torus. The hydrodynamic equation found is a quasilinear SPDE with a `rough' random drift term coming from a scaling of the random environment and a homogenization of the particle interaction. Part of the motivation for this work is to understand how the space-time limit of the particle mass relates to that of the known single particle Brox diffusion limit. In this respect, given the hydrodynamic limit shown, we describe form…
We apply the techniques developed in Comets and Popov (2003) to present a new proof to Sinai's theorem (Sinai, 1982) on one-dimensional random walk in random environment (RWRE), working in a scale-free way to avoid rescaling arguments and splitting the proof in two independent parts: a quenched one, related to the measure $P_ω$ conditioned on a fixed, typical realization $ω$ of the environment, and an annealed one, related to the product measure $\mathbb{P}$ of the environment $ω$. The quenched part still holds even if we use another measure (possibly dependent) for the environment.
We revisit the problem of estimates of moments of random n-dimensional matrices of Wigner ensemble by using the approach elaborated by Ya. Sinai and A. Soshnikov and further developed by A. Ruzmaikina. Our main subject is given by the structure of closed even walks and their graphs that arise in these studies. We show that the total degree of a vertex of such a graph depends not only on the self-intersections degree of but also on the total number of all non-closed instants of self-intersections of the walk. This result is used to fill the gaps of earlier considerations.
We clarify the asymptotic of the limsup of the size of the neighborhood of concentration of Sinai's walk improving the result in \cite{Pierre3}. Also we get the almost sure limit of the number of points visited more than a small but fixed proportion of a given amount of time.
In this article, a localisation result is proved for the biased random walk on the range of a simple random walk in high dimensions (d \geq 5). This demonstrates that, unlike in the supercritical percolation setting, a slowdown effect occurs as soon a non-trivial bias is introduced. The proof applies a decomposition of the underlying simple random walk path at its cut-times to relate the associated biased random walk to a one-dimensional random walk in a random environment in Sinai's regime.
We prove an annealed weak limit of the trajectory of the random walks in cooling random environment (RWCRE) under both slow (polynomial) and fast (exponential) cooling. We identify the weak limit when the underlying static environment is recurrent (Sinai's model). Avena and den Hollander have previously proved law of large numbers and Gaussian fluctuation of RWCRE. We find that the weak limit of the trajectory exists as a time-rescaled Brownian motion in the slow cooling case but the limit degenerates to a constant function in the fast cooling case.
Recently, the quaternionic quantum walk was formulated by the first author as a generalization of discrete-time quantum walks. We treat the right eigenvalue problem of quaternionic matrices to analysis the spectra of its transition matrix. The way to obtain all the right eigenvalues of a quaternionic matrix is given. From the unitary condition on the transition matrix of the quaternionic quantum walk, we deduce some properties about it. Our main results, Theorem 5.3, determine all the right eigenvalues of a quaternionic quantum walk by use of those of the corresponding weighted matrix. In addi…
We focus on the three-state quantum walk(QW) in one dimension. In this paper, we give the stationary measure in general condition, originated from the eigenvalue problem. Firstly, we get the transfer matrices by our new recipe, and solve the eigenvalue problem. Then we obtain the general form of the stationary measure for concrete initial state and eigenvalue. We also show some specific examples of the stationary measure for the three-state QW. One of the interesting and crucial future problems is to make clear the whole picture of the set of stationary measures.
We show that one-dimensional random walks in a quasi-periodic environment with Liouville frequency generically have an erratic statistical behavior. In the recurrent case we show that neither quenched nor annealed limit theorems hold and both drift and variance exhibit wild oscillations, being logarithmic at some times and almost linear at other times. In the transient case we show that the annealed Central Limit Theorem fails generically. These results are in stark contrast with the Diophantine case where the Central Limit Theorem with linear drift and variance was established by Sinai.
We study the random walk in random environment on {0,1,2,...}, where the environment is subject to a vanishing (random) perturbation. The two particular cases we consider are: (i) random walk in random environment perturbed from Sinai's regime; (ii) simple random walk with random perturbation. We give almost sure results on how far the random walker will be from the origin after a long time t, for almost every environment. We give both upper and lower almost sure bounds. These bounds are of order $(\log t)^β$, for $β\in (1,\infty)$, depending on the perturbation. In addition, in the ergodic ca…
We consider d independent walkers on Z, m of them performing simple symmetric random walk and r = d -- m of them performing recurrent RWRE (Sinai walk), in I independent random environments. We show that the product is recurrent, almost surely, if and only if m $\le$ 1 or m = d = 2. In the transient case with r $\ge$ 1, we prove that the walkers meet infinitely often, almost surely, if and only if m = 2 and r $\ge$ I = 1. In particular, while I does not have an influence for the recurrence or transience, it does play a role for the probability to have infinitely many meetings. To obtain these …
We consider, in the continuous time version, $γ$ independent random walks on $\mathbb{Z_+}$ in random environment in the Sinai's regime. Let $T_\gam$ be the first meeting time of one pair of the $γ$ random walks starting at different positions. We first show that the tail of the quenched distribution of $T_γ$, after a suitable rescaling, converges in probability, to some functional of the Brownian motion. Then we compute the law of this functional. Eventually, we obtain results about the moments of this meeting time. Being $\Eo$ the quenched expectation, we show that, for almost all environmen…
We study paths of time-length $t$ of a continuous-time random walk on $\mathbb Z^2$ subject to self-interaction that depends on the geometry of the walk range and a collection of random, uniformly positive and finite edge weights. The interaction enters through a Gibbs weight at inverse temperature $β$; the "energy" is the total sum of the edge weights for edges on the outer boundary of the range. For edge weights sampled from a translation-invariant, ergodic law, we prove that the range boundary condensates around an asymptotic shape in the limit $t\to\infty$ followed by $β\to\infty$. The lim…
The purpose of this note is twofold: firstly to improve the known results on variation of extreme eigenvalues of birth and death matrices and random walk matrices; and secondly to progress towards the solution of a thirty years old open problem concerning the variation of eigenvalues of these matrices. Keywords: Birth and death matrices, random walk matrices, eigenvalues, monotonicity
We define a quaternionic extension of the Szegedy walk on a graph and study its right spectral properties. The condition for the transition matrix of the quaternionic Szegedy walk on a graph to be quaternionic unitary is given. In order to derive the spectral mapping theorem for the quaternionic Szegedy walk, we derive a quaternionic extension of the determinant expression of the second weighted zeta function of a graph. Our main results determine explicitly all the right eigenvalues of the quaternionic Szegedy walk by using complex right eigenvalues of the corresponding doubly weighted matrix…
We introduce random walks in a sparse random environment on $\mathbb Z$ and investigate basic asymptotic properties of this model, such as recurrence-transience, asymptotic speed, and limit theorems in both the transient and recurrent regimes. The new model combines features of several existing models of random motion in random media and admits a transparent physical interpretation. More specifically, a random walk in a sparse random environment can be characterized as a "locally strong" perturbation of a simple random walk by a random potential induced by "rare impurities," which are randomly…
We consider the one-sided exit problem for (fractionally) integrated random walks and Lévy processes. We prove that the rate of decrease of the non-exit probability -- the so-called survival exponent -- is universal in this class of processes. In particular, the survival exponent can be inferred from the (fractionally) integrated Brownian motion. This, in particular, extends Sinai's result on the survival exponent for the integrated simple random walk to general random walks with some finite exponential moment. Further, we prove existence and monotonicity of the survival exponent of fractional…
Let $S_n$ be a centered random walk with a finite variance, and define the new sequence $A_n:=\sum_{i=1}^n S_i$, which we call an integrated random walk. We are interested in the asymptotics of $$p_N:=P(\min_{1 \le k \le N} A_k \ge 0)$$ as $N \to \infty$. Sinai (1992) proved that $p_N \asymp N^{-1/4}$ if $S_n$ is a simple random walk. We show that $p_N \asymp N^{-1/4}$ for some other types of random walks that include double-sided exponential and double-sided geometric walks, both not necessarily symmetric. We also prove that $p_N \le c N^{-1/4}$ for lattice walks and for upper exponential wal…
This paper studies a family of random walks defined on the finite ordinals using their order reversing involutions. Starting at $x \in \{0,1,\ldots,n-1\}$, an element $y \le x$ is chosen according to a prescribed probability distribution, and the walk then steps to $n-1-y$. We show that under very mild assumptions these walks are irreducible, recurrent and ergodic. We then find the invariant distributions, eigenvalues and eigenvectors of a distinguished subfamily of walks whose transition matrices have the global anti-diagonal eigenvalue property studied in earlier work by Ochiai, Sasada, Shir…
Let $(τ_x)_{x \in \Z^d}$ be i.i.d. random variables with heavy (polynomial) tails. Given $a \in [0,1]$, we consider the Markov process defined by the jump rates $ω_{x \to y} = {τ_x}^{-(1-a)} {τ_y}^a$ between two neighbours $x$ and $y$ in $\Z^d$. We give the asymptotic behaviour of the principal eigenvalue of the generator of this process, with Dirichlet boundary condition. The prominent feature is a phase transition that occurs at some threshold depending on the dimension.
Considering quantum random walks, we construct discrete-time approximations of the eigenvalues processes of minors of Hermitian Brownian motion. It has been recently proved by Adler, Nordenstam and van Moerbeke that the process of eigenvalues of two consecutive minors of an Hermitian Brownian motion is a Markov process, whereas if one considers more than two consecutive minors, the Markov property fails. We show that there are analog results in the noncommutative counterpart and establish the Markov property of eigenvalues of some particular submatrices of Hermitian Brownian motion.
In this paper, we define a new type of decoherent quantum random walks with parameter $0\le p\le 1$, which becomes a unitary quantum random walk (UQRW) when $p=0$ and an open quantum random walk (OPRW) when $p=1$ respectively. We call this process a partially open quantum random walk (POQRW). We study the limiting distribution of a POQRW on $Z^1$ subject to decoherence on coins with $n$ degrees of freedom, which converges to a convex combination of normal distributions if the superoperator $\mathcal{L}_{kk}$ satisfies the eigenvalue condition, that is, 1 is an eigenvalue of $\mathcal{L}_{kk}$ …
We prove that the spectral radius of a strongly irreducible random walk on GLd(R) (or more generally the vector of moduli of eigenvalues of a Zariski-dense random walk on a reductive group) satisfies a central limit theorem under an order two moment assumption.
We consider a continuous time random walk $X$ in random environment on $\Z^+$ such that its potential can be approximated by the function $V: \R^+\to \R$ given by $V(x)=\sig W(x) -\frac{b}{1-\alf}x^{1-\alf}$ where $\sig W$ a Brownian motion with diffusion coefficient $\sig>0$ and parameters $b$, $\alf$ are such that $b>0$ and $0<\alf<1/2$. We show that $¶$-a.s.\ (where $¶$ is the averaged law) $\lim_{t\to \infty} \frac{X_t}{(C^*(\ln\ln t)^{-1}\ln t)^{\frac{1}{\alf}}}=1$ with $C^*=\frac{2\alf b}{\sig^2(1-2\alf)}$. In fact, we prove that by showing that there is a trap located around $(C^*(\ln\l…
After a general introduction to the field, we describe some recent results concerning disorder effects on both `random walk models', where the random walk is a dynamical process generated by local transition rules, and on `polymer models', where each random walk trajectory representing the configuration of a polymer chain is associated to a global Boltzmann weight. For random walk models, we explain, on the specific examples of the Sinai model and of the trap model, how disorder induces anomalous diffusion, aging behaviours and Golosov localization, and how these properties can be understood v…
In this paper, we study the discrete-time quantum random walks on a line subject to decoherence. The convergence of the rescaled position probability distribution $p(x,t)$ depends mainly on the spectrum of the superoperator $\mathcal{L}_{kk}$. We show that if 1 is an eigenvalue of the superoperator with multiplicity one and there is no other eigenvalue whose modulus equals to 1, then $\hat {P}(\fracν {\sqrt t},t)$ converges to a convex combination of normal distributions. In terms of position space, the rescaled probability mass function $p_t (x, t) \equiv p(\sqrt t x, t)$, $ x \in Z/\sqrt t$,…
Random walk in random environment (RWRE) is a fundamental model of statistical mechanics, describing the movement of a particle in a highly disordered and inhomogeneous medium as a random walk with random jump probabilities. It has been introduced in a series of papers by Chernov and Temkin as a model for DNA chain replication and crystal growth, and also as a model for turbulent behavior in fluids through a Lorentz gas description by Sinai. It is a simple but powerful model for a variety of complex large-scale disordered phenomena arising from fields such as physics, biology and engineering. …
We consider a supercritical symmetric continuous-time branching random walk on a multidimensional lattice with a finite number of particle generation sources of varying positive intensities without any restrictions on the variance of jumps of the underlying random walk. It is assumed that the spectrum of the evolution operator contains at least one positive eigenvalue. We prove that under these conditions the largest eigenvalue of the evolution operator is simple and determines the rate of exponential growth of particle quantities at every point on the lattice as well as on the lattice as a wh…
We consider a continuous-time symmetric supercritical branching random walk on a multidimensional lattice with a finite set of the particle generation centres, i.e. branching sources. The main object of study is the evolutionary operator for the mean number of particles both at an arbitrary point and on the entire lattice. The existence of positive eigenvalues in the spectrum of an evolutionary operator results in an exponential growth of the number of particles in branching random walks, called supercritical in the such case. For supercritical branching random walks, it is shown that the amou…
We show bounds on total variation and $L^{\infty}$ mixing times, spectral gap and magnitudes of the complex valued eigenvalues of a general (non-reversible non-lazy) Markov chain with a minor expansion property. This leads to the first known bounds for the non-lazy simple and max-degree walks on a (directed) graph, and even in the lazy case they are the first bounds of the optimal order. In particular, it is found that within a factor of two or four, the worst case of each of these mixing time and eigenvalue quantities is a walk on a cycle with clockwise drift.
We analyze random walks on a class of semigroups called ``left-regular bands''. These walks include the hyperplane chamber walks of Bidigare, Hanlon, and Rockmore. Using methods of ring theory, we show that the transition matrices are diagonalizable and we calculate the eigenvalues and multiplicities. The methods lead to explicit formulas for the projections onto the eigenspaces. As examples of these semigroup walks, we construct a random walk on the maximal chains of any distributive lattice, as well as two random walks associated with any matroid. The examples include a q-analogue of the Tse…
Spectral embedding of graphs uses the top k non-trivial eigenvectors of the random walk matrix to embed the graph into R^k. The primary use of this embedding has been for practical spectral clustering algorithms [SM00,NJW02]. Recently, spectral embedding was studied from a theoretical perspective to prove higher order variants of Cheeger's inequality [LOT12,LRTV12]. We use spectral embedding to provide a unifying framework for bounding all the eigenvalues of graphs. For example, we show that for any finite graph with n vertices and all k >= 2, the k-th largest eigenvalue is at most 1-Omega(k^3…
We study a semiclassical random walk with respect to a probability measure with a finite number n_0 of wells. We show that the associated operator has exactly n_0 exponentially close to 1 eigenvalues (in the semiclassical sense), and that the other are O(h) away from 1. We also give an asymptotic of these small eigenvalues. The key ingredient in our approach is a general factorization result of pseudodifferential operators, which allows us to use recent results on the Witten Laplacian.
In this paper, we consider a spectral analysis of discrete time quantum walks on the path. For isospectral coin cases, we show that the time averaged distribution and stationary distributions of the quantum walks are described by the pair of eigenvalues of the coins as well as the eigenvalues and eigenvectors of the corresponding random walks which are usually referred as the birth and death chains. As an example of the results, we derive the time averaged distribution of so-called Szegedy's walk which is related to the Ehrenfest model. It is represented by Krawtchouk polynomials which is the …
We show the minimum spectral gap of the normalized Laplacian over all simple, connected graphs on $n$ vertices is $(1+o(1))\tfrac{54}{n^3}$. This minimum is achieved asymptotically by a double kite graph. Consequently, this leads to sharp upper bounds for the maximum relaxation time of a random walk, settling a conjecture of Aldous and Fill. We also improve an eigenvalue-diameter inequality by giving a new lower bound for the spectral gap of the normalized Laplacian. This eigenvalue lower bound is asymptotically best possible.
We present precise moderate deviation probabilities, in both quenched and annealed settings, for a recurrent diffusion process with a Brownian potential. Our method relies on fine tools in stochastic calculus, including Kotani's lemma and Lamperti's representation for exponential functionals. In particular, our result for quenched moderate deviations is in agreement with a recent theorem of Comets and Popov [Probab. Theory Related Fields 126 (2003) 571-609] who studied the corresponding problem for Sinai's random walk in random environment.
In this thesis we introduce a new type of card shuffle called the one-sided transposition shuffle. At each step a card is chosen uniformly from the pack and then transposed with another card chosen uniformly from below it. This defines a random walk on the symmetric group generated by a distribution which is non-constant on the conjugacy class of transpositions. Nevertheless, we provide an explicit formula for all eigenvalues of the shuffle by demonstrating a useful correspondence between eigenvalues and standard Young tableaux. This allows us to prove the existence of a total-variation cutoff…
