Full-path localization of directed polymers

Abstract

Certain polymer models are known to exhibit path localization in the sense that at low temperatures, the average fractional overlap of two independent samples from the Gibbs measure is bounded away from 0. Nevertheless, the question of where along the path this overlap takes place has remained unaddressed. In this article, we prove that on linear scales, overlap occurs along the entire length of the polymer. Namely, we consider time intervals of length $\mathit{\epsilon }N$, where $\mathit{\epsilon }>0$ is fixed but arbitrarily small. We then identify a constant number of distinguished trajectories such that the Gibbs measure is concentrated on paths having, with one of these distinguished paths, a fixed positive overlap simultaneously in every such interval. This result is obtained in all dimensions for a Gaussian random environment by using a recent non-local result as a key input.