Pinning Model with Heavy Tailed Disorder

Abstract

We study the so-called pinning model, which describes the behavior of a Markov chain interacting with a distinguished state. The interaction depends on an external source of randomness, called disorder, which can attract or repel the Markov chain path. We focus on the case when the disorder is heavy-tailed, with infinite mean, while the return times of the Markov chain have a stretched-exponential distribution. We prove that the set of times at which the Markov chain visits the distinguished state, suitably rescaled, converges in distribution to a limit set, which depends only on the disorder and on the interplay of the parameters. We also show that there exists a random threshold below which the limit set is trivial. As a byproduct of our techniques, we improve and complete a result of Auffinger and Louidor on the directed polymer in a random environment with heavy tailed disorder.