The Tail Distribution of the Partition Function for Directed Polymers in the Weak Disorder Phase

Abstract

We investigate the upper tail distribution of the partition function of the directed polymer in a random environment on \({{\mathbb {Z}}} ^d\) in the weak disorder phase. We show that the distribution of the infinite volume partition function \(W^{\beta }_{\infty }\) displays a power-law decay, with an exponent \(p^*(\beta )\in [1+\frac{2}{d},\infty )\). We also prove that the distribution of the suprema of the point-to-point and point-to-line partition functions display the same behavior. On the way to these results, we prove a technical estimate of independent interest: the \(L^p\)-norm of the partition function at the time when it overshoots a high value A is comparable to A. We use this estimate to extend the validity of many recent results that were proved under the assumption that the environment is upper bounded.