## Departmental PhD Thesis Exam – Jeremy Voltz

Everyone is welcome to attend.  Refreshments will be served in the Math Lounge before the exam.

Wednesday, July 20, 2016
11:10 a.m.
BA6183

PhD Candidate:  Jeremy Voltz
Supervisor:  Kostya Khanin
Thesis title:  Two results on Asymptotic Behaviour of Random Walks in Random Environment

****

Abstract:

In the first chapter of this thesis, we consider a model of directed polymer in $1+1$ dimensions in a product-type random environment $\omega(t,x) = b(t) F(x)$,  where the  fields $F$ and $b$ are i.i.d., with $F(x)$ continuous, symmetric and bounded, and $b(t) = \pm 1$ with probability $1/2$.  Thus $\omega$ can be viewed as the field $F$ oscillating in time.  We consider directed last-passage percolation through this random field; namely, we investigate the behavior of the length $n$ polymer path with maximal action, where the action of a path is simply the sum of the environment variables it moves through.

We prove a law of large numbers for the maximal action of the path from the origin to a fixed endpoint $(n, \lfloor \alpha n \rfloor)$, and investigate the limiting shape function $a(\alpha)$.  We prove that this shape function is non-linear, and has a corner at $\alpha = 0$, thus indicating that this model does not belong to the KPZ universality class.  We conjecture that this shape function has a linear piece near $\alpha = 0$.

With probability tending to $1$, the maximizing path with free endpoint will localize on an edge with $F$ values far from each other.  Under an assumption on the arrival time to this localization site, we prove that the path endpoint and the centered action of the path, both rescaled by $n^{-2/3}$, converge jointly to a universal law, given by the maximizer and value of a functional on a Poisson point process.

In the second chapter, we consider a class of multidimensional random walks in random environment, where the environment is of the type $p_0 + \gamma \xi$, with $p_0$ a deterministic, homogeneous environment with underlying drift, and $\xi$ an i.i.d. random perturbation.   Such environments were considered by Sabot in \cite{Sabot2004}, who finds a third-order expansion in the perturbation for the non-null velocity (which is guaranteed to exist by Sznitman and Zerner’s LLN \cite{Sznitman1999}).  We prove that this velocity is an analytic function of the perturbation, by applying perturbation theory techniques to the Markov operator for a certain Markov chain in the space of environments.

A copy of the thesis can be found here:  ut-thesis-Voltz