Recurrence and transience of random walks in random environments on a strip (Q5938865)

The authors investigate the general problem of recurrence and transience random walks on a strip. The main result of the paper consists in establishing a relation between the characteristics of random walk and the top Lyapunov exponent of a product of a stationary sequence of positive matrices. In particular it is shown that if the Lyapunov exponent is negative, the random walk converges to \(+\infty\) with probability one and if it is positive, the random walk is shown to converge to \(-\infty\). Finally the random walk is shown to be recurrent if the exponent is zero.