Nikos Zygouras

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

We consider a polymer with configuration modeled by the trajectory of a Markov chain, interacting with a potential of form u + Vn when it visits a particular state 0 at time n, with {Vn} representing i.i.d. quenched disorder. There is a critical value of u 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 n takes the form φ(n)/n for some slowly varying φ; this includes simple random walk in two dimensions. We show that in this case, at all temperatures, the critical values of u 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.

Strong disorder in semidirected random polymers

We consider a random walk in a random potential, which models a situation of a random polymer and we study the annealed and quenched costs to perform long crossings from a point to a hyperplane. These costs are measured by the so called Lyapounov norms. We identify situations where the point-to-hyperplane annealed and quenched Lyapounov norms are different. We also prove that in these cases the polymer path exhibits localization.

Universality in marginally relevant disordered systems

We consider disordered systems of directed polymer type, for which disorder is so-called marginally relevant. These include the usual (short-range) directed polymer model in dimension (2+1), the long-range directed polymer model with Cauchy tails in dimension (1+1) and the disordered pinning model with tail exponent 1/2. We show that in a suitable weak disorder and continuum limit, the partition functions of these different models converge to a universal limit: a log-normal random field with a multi-scale correlation structure, which undergoes a phase transition as the disorder strength varies. As a by-product, we show that the solution of the two-dimensional Stochastic Heat Equation, suitably regularized, converges to the same limit. The proof, which uses the celebrated Fourth Moment Theorem, reveals an interesting chaos structure shared by all models in the above class.

The continuum disordered pinning model

Any renewal processes on

Point-to-line polymers and orthogonal Whittaker functions

{\mathbb {N}}_0

Quenched and Annealed Critical Points in Polymer Pinning Models

N0 with a polynomial tail, with exponent

Polynomial chaos and scaling limits of disordered systems

\alpha \in (0,1)