Paper No. 09-22

Download 09-22

KS Alexander and N Zygouras

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

Abstract: We consider a polymer with conguration 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 fVng 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 '(n)=n for some slowly varying '; 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 dier at least at low temperatures.