Directed polymers on a Cayley tree with spatially correlated disorder

TL;DR

This paper studies directed polymers on a Cayley tree with spatially correlated disorder, revealing how long-range correlations fundamentally alter the free energy behavior and phase transition properties compared to short-range correlations.

Contribution

It introduces a model with spatially correlated disorder on a Cayley tree and analyzes how long-range correlations change the free energy and phase transition characteristics.

Findings

Long-range correlations lead to a non-extensive free energy for intermediate L.

No phase transition occurs in the long-range correlated case, unlike the short-range case.

A crossover temperature T_c(L) grows with L, indicating a shift in system behavior.

Abstract

In this paper we consider directed walks on a tree with a fixed branching ratio K at a finite temperature T. We consider the case where each site (or link) is assigned a random energy uncorrelated in time, but correlated in the transverse direction i.e. within the shell. In this paper we take the transverse distance to be the hierarchical ultrametric distance, but other possibilities are discussed. We compute the free energy for the case of quenched disorder and show that there is a fundamental difference between the case of short range spatial correlations of the disorder which behaves similarly to the non-correlated case considered previously by Derrida and Spohn and the case of long range correlations which has a totally different overlap distribution which approaches a single delta function about q=1 for large L, where L is the length of the walk. In the latter case the free energy is not extensive in L for the intermediate and also relevant range of L values, although in the true thermodynamic limit extensivity is restored. We identify a crossover temperature which grows with L, and whenever T<T_c(L) the system is always in the low temperature phase. Thus in the case of long-ranged correlation as opposed to the short-ranged case a phase transition is absent.