Hierarchical pinning model with site disorder: Disorder is marginally relevant

We study a hierarchical disordered pinning model with site disorder for which, like in the bond disordered case [6, 9], there exists a value of a parameter b (enters in the definition of the hierarchical lattice) that separates an irrelevant disorder regime and a relevant disorder regime. We show that for such a value of b the critical point of the disordered system is different from the critical point of the annealed version of the model. The proof goes beyond the technique used in [9] and it takes explicitly advantage of the inhomogeneous character of the Green function of the model.Comment: 13 pages, 1 figure, final version accepted for publication. to appear in Probability Theory and Related Field

Superdiffusivity for Brownian Motion in a Poissonian Potential with Long Range Correlation I: Lower Bound on the Volume Exponent

We study trajectories of d-dimensional Brownian Motion in Poissonian potential up to the hitting time of a distant hyper-plane. Our Poissonian potential V can be associated to a field of traps whose centers location is given by a Poisson Point process and whose radii are IID distributed with a common distribution that has unbounded support; it has the particularity of having long-range correlation. We focus on the case where the law of the trap radii has power-law decay and prove that superdiffusivity hold under certain condition, and get a lower bound on the volume exponent. Results differ quite much with the one that have been obtained for the model with traps of bounded radii by W\"uhtrich: the superdiffusivity phenomenon is enhanced by the presence of correlation.Comment: 28 pages, 3 figures, Title changed, some proof simplified, to appear in AIH

Existence of an intermediate phase for oriented percolation

We consider the following oriented percolation model of $\mathbb {N} \times \mathbb{Z}^d$: we equip $\mathbb {N}\times \mathbb{Z}^d$ with the edge set $\{[(n,x),(n+1,y)] | n\in \mathbb {N}, x,y\in \mathbb{Z}^d\}$, and we say that each edge is open with probability $p f(y-x)$ where $f(y-x)$ is a fixed non-negative compactly supported function on $\mathbb{Z}^d$ with $\sum_{z\in \mathbb{Z}^d} f(z)=1$ and $p\in [0,\inf f^{-1}]$ is the percolation parameter. Let $p_c$ denote the percolation threshold ans $Z_N$ the number of open oriented-paths of length $N$ starting from the origin, and study the growth of $Z_N$ when percolation occurs. We prove that for if $d\ge 5$ and the function $f$ is sufficiently spread-out, then there exists a second threshold $p_c^{(2)}>p_c$ such that $Z_N/p^N$ decays exponentially fast for $p\in(p_c,p_c^{(2)})$ and does not so when $p> p_c^{(2)}$. The result should extend to the nearest neighbor-model for high-dimension, and for the spread-out model when $d=3,4$. It is known that this phenomenon does not occur in dimension 1 and 2.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures, further typos corrected, enlarged intro and bibliograph

Non-coincidence of Quenched and Annealed Connective Constants on the supercritical planar percolation cluster

In this paper, we study the abundance of self-avoiding paths of a given length on a supercritical percolation cluster on \bbZ^d. More precisely, we count $Z_N$ the number of self-avoiding paths of length $N$ on the infinite cluster, starting from the origin (that we condition to be in the cluster). We are interested in estimating the upper growth rate of $Z_N$, $\limsup_{N\to \infty} Z_N^{1/N}$, that we call the connective constant of the dilute lattice. After proving that this connective constant is a.s.\ non-random, we focus on the two-dimensional case and show that for every percolation parameter $p\in (1/2,1)$, almost surely, $Z_N$ grows exponentially slower than its expected value. In other word we prove that \limsup_{N\to \infty} (Z_N)^{1/N} <\lim_{N\to \infty} \bbE[Z_N]^{1/N} where expectation is taken with respect to the percolation process. This result can be considered as a first mathematical attempt to understand the influence of disorder for self-avoiding walk on a (quenched) dilute lattice. Our method, which combines change of measure and coarse graining arguments, does not rely on specifics of percolation on \bbZ^2, so that our result can be extended to a large family of two dimensional models including general self-avoiding walk in random environment.Comment: 25 pages. Version accepted for publication in PTR

The Simple Exclusion Process on the Circle has a diffusive Cutoff Window

In this paper, we investigate the mixing time of the simple exclusion process on the circle with $N$ sites, with a number of particle $k(N)$ tending to infinity, both from the worst initial condition and from a typical initial condition. We show that the worst-case mixing time is asymptotically equivalent to $(8\pi^2)^{-1}N^2\log k$, while the cutoff window, is identified to be $N^2$. Starting from a typical condition, we show that there is no cutoff and that the mixing time is of order $N^2$.Comment: 37 pages, 3 Figure