Spiders in random environment

Christophe Gallesco, Sebastian Muller, Serguei Popov, Marina Vachkovskaia

Published 2010-01-14, updated 2010-12-04Version 3

A spider consists of several, say $N$, particles. Particles can jump independently according to a random walk if the movement does not violate some given restriction rules. If the movement violates a rule it is not carried out. We consider random walk in random environment (RWRE) on $\Z$ as underlying random walk. We suppose the environment $\omega=(\omega_x)_{x \in \Z}$ to be elliptic, with positive drift and nestling, so that there exists a unique positive constant $\kappa$ such that $\E[((1-\omega_0)/\omega_0)^{\kappa}]=1$. The restriction rules are kept very general; we only assume transitivity and irreducibility of the spider. The main result is that the speed of a spider is positive if $\kappa/N>1$ and null if $\kappa/N<1$. In particular, if $\kappa/N <1$ a spider has null speed but the speed of a (single) RWRE is positive.