A crossover for the bad configurations of random walk in random scenery (Q651012)

A random walk and a random color scenery on \(\mathbb Z\) are considered. The increments of the walk and the colors of the scenery are assumed to be i.i.d. and to be independent of each other. The random process of colors seen by the walk during the course of time is studied. Bad configurations for this random process are the discontinuity points of the conditional probability distribution for the color seen at time zero given the colors seen at all later times. The case where the random walk has increments \(0, +1\) or \(-1\) with probability \(\varepsilon\), \((1-\varepsilon)p\) and \((1-\varepsilon)(1-p)\), respectively, with \(p\in [1/2, 1]\) and \(\varepsilon\in [0,1)\), and where the scenery assigns the color black or white to the sites of \(\mathbb Z\) with probability \(1/2\) each is considered. It is proved that the set of bad configurations exhibits a crossover: for \(\varepsilon=0\) and \(p\in (1/2, 4/5)\) all configurations are bad, while for \((p,\varepsilon)\) in an open neighborhood of \((1,0)\) all configurations are good. Also, it is shown that, for \(\varepsilon=0\) and \(p=1/2\), both bad and good configurations exist.