Pinning of a renewal on a quenched renewal

Abstract

We introduce the pinning model on a quenched renewal, which is an instance of a (strongly correlated) disordered pinning model. The potential takes value 1 at the renewal times of a quenched realization of a renewal process $\sigma$, and $0$ elsewhere, so nonzero potential values become sparse if the gaps in $\sigma$ have infinite mean. The "polymer" -- of length $\sigma_N$ -- is given by another renewal $\tau$, whose law is modified by the Boltzmann weight $\exp(\beta\sum_{n=1}^N \mathbf{1}_{\{\sigma_n\in\tau\}})$. Our assumption is that $\tau$ and $\sigma$ have gap distributions with power-law-decay exponents $1+\alpha$ and $1+\tilde \alpha$ respectively, with $\alpha\geq 0,\tilde \alpha>0$. There is a localization phase transition: above a critical value $\beta_c$ the free energy is positive, meaning that $\tau$ is \emph{pinned} on the quenched renewal $\sigma$. We consider the question of relevance of the disorder, that is to know when $\beta_c$ differs from its annealed counterpart $\beta_c^{\rm ann}$. We show that $\beta_c=\beta_c^{\rm ann}$ whenever $ \alpha+\tilde \alpha \geq 1$, and $\beta_c=0$ if and only if the renewal $\tau\cap\sigma$ is recurrent. On the other hand, we show $\beta_c>\beta_c^{\rm ann}$ when $ \alpha+\frac32\, \tilde \alpha <1$. We give evidence that this should in fact be true whenever $ \alpha+\tilde \alpha<1$, providing examples for all such $ \alpha,\tilde \alpha$ of distributions of $\tau,\sigma$ for which $\beta_c>\beta_c^{\rm ann}$. We additionally consider two natural variants of the model: one in which the polymer and disorder are constrained to have equal numbers of renewals ($\sigma_N=\tau_N$), and one in which the polymer length is $\tau_N$ rather than $\sigma_N$. In both cases we show the critical point is the same as in the original model, at least when $ \alpha>0$.