English

Coincidence of critical points for directed polymers for general environments and random walks

Probability 2026-04-15 v2

Abstract

For the directed polymer in a random environment (DPRE), two critical inverse-temperatures can be defined. The first one, βc\beta_c, separates the strong disorder regime (in which the normalized partition function WnβW^{\beta}_n tends to zero) from the weak disorder regime (in which WnβW^{\beta}_n converges to a nontrivial limit). The other, βˉc\bar \beta_c, delimits the very strong disorder regime (in which WnβW^{\beta}_n converges to zero exponentially fast). It was proved previously that βc=βˉc\beta_c=\bar \beta_c when the random environment is upper-bounded for the DPRE based on the simple random walk. We extend this result to general environment and arbitrary reference walk. We also prove that βc=0\beta_c=0 if and only the L2L^2-critical point is trivial.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.04113,
  title  = {Coincidence of critical points for directed polymers for general environments and random walks},
  author = {Stefan Junk and Hubert Lacoin},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.04113},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

31 pages, revised version