English

Equality of critical points for polymer depinning transitions with loop exponent one

Probability 2010-01-14 v2 Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

We consider a polymer with configuration modelled by the trajectory of a Markov chain, interacting with a potential of form u+Vnu+V_n when it visits a particular state 0 at time nn, with {Vn}\{V_n\} representing i.i.d. quenched disorder. There is a critical value of uu above which the polymer is pinned by the potential. A particular case not covered in a number of previous studies is that of loop exponent one, in which the probability of an excursion of length nn takes the form ϕ(n)/n\phi(n)/n for some slowly varying ϕ\phi; this includes simple random walk in two dimensions. We show that in this case, at all temperatures, the critical values of uu in the quenched and annealed models are equal, in contrast to all other loop exponents, for which these critical values are known to differ, at least at low temperatures.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0811.1902,
  title  = {Equality of critical points for polymer depinning transitions with loop exponent one},
  author = {Kenneth S. Alexander and Nikos Zygouras},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0811.1902},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

Published in at http://dx.doi.org/10.1214/09-AAP621 the Annals of Applied Probability (http://www.imstat.org/aap/) by the Institute of Mathematical Statistics (http://www.imstat.org)

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:40:45.963Z