Limiting distributions and large deviations for random walks in random environments

Abstract

This thesis concerns the study of random walks in random environments (RWRE). Since there are two levels of randomness for random walks in random environments, there are two different distributions for the random walk that can be studied. The quenched distribution is the law of the random walk conditioned on a given environment. The annealed distribution is the quenched law averaged over all environments. The main results of the thesis fall into two categories: quenched limiting distributions for one-dimensional, transient RWRE and annealed large deviations for multidimensional RWRE. The analysis of the quenched distributions for transient, one-dimensional RWRE falls into two separate cases. First, when an annealed central limit theorem holds, we prove that a quenched central limit theorem also holds but with a random (depending on the environment) centering. In contrast, when the annealed limit distribution is not Gaussian, we prove that there is no quenched limiting distribution for the RWRE. Moreover, we show that for almost every environment, there exist two random (depending on the environment) sequences of times, along which random walk has different quenched limiting distributions. While an annealed large deviation principle for multidimensional RWRE was known previously, very little qualitative information was available about the annealed large deviation rate function. We prove that if the law on environments is non-nestling, then the annealed large deviation rate function is analytic in a neighborhood of its unique zero (which is the limiting velocity of the RWRE).