Directed polymers in random environment with heavy tails

Antonio Auffinger, Oren Louidor

Published 2010-01-07Version 1

We study the model of Directed Polymers in Random Environment in 1+1 dimensions, where the distribution at a site has a tail which decays regularly polynomially with power \alpha, where \alpha \in (0,2). After proper scaling of temperature \beta^{-1}, we show strong localization of the polymer to a favorable region in the environment where energy and entropy are best balanced. We prove that this region has a weak limit under linear scaling and identify the limiting distribution as an (\alpha, \beta)-indexed family of measures on Lipschitz curves lying inside the 45-degrees-rotated square with unit diagonal. In particular, this shows order n transversal fluctuations of the polymer. If, and only if, \alpha is small enough, we find that there exists a random critical temperature below which, but not above, the effect of the environment is macroscopic. The results carry over to d+1 dimensions for d>1 with minor modifications.