Pinning, diffusive fluctuations, and Gaussian limits for half-space directed polymer models

Victor Ginsburg

Published 2023-12-18, updated 2024-01-05Version 2

Half-space directed polymers in random environments are models of interface growth in the presence of an attractive hard wall. They arise naturally in the study of wetting and entropic repulsion phenomena. In 1985, Kardar predicted a "depinning" phase transition as the attractive force of the wall is weakened. This phase transition has been rigorously established for integrable models of half-space last passage percolation, i.e. half-space directed polymers at zero temperature, in a line of study tracing back to work of Baik--Rains. On the other hand, for integrable positive temperature models, the first rigorous proof of this phase transition has only been obtained very recently through a series of works of Barraquand--Wang, Imamura--Mucciconi--Sasamoto [IMS], Barraquand--Corwin--Das, and Das--Zhu [DZ] on the half-space log-Gamma polymer. In this paper we study a broad class of half-space directed polymer models with minimal assumptions on the random environment. We prove that an attractive force on the wall strong enough to macroscopically increase the free energy induces phenomena characteristic of the subcritical "bound phase," namely the pinning of the polymer to the wall and the diffusive fluctuations and limiting Gaussianity of the free energy. Our arguments are geometric in nature and allow us to analyze the positive temperature and zero temperature models simultaneously. Moreover, given the macroscopic free energy increase proven in [IMS] for the half-space log-Gamma polymer, our arguments can be used to reprove the results of [IMS, DZ] on polymer geometry and free energy fluctuations in the bound phase.