Disordered pinning models and copolymers: Beyond annealed bounds (Q939081)

The author considers a rather general class of directed polymers interacting with a one-dimensional defect through a quenched disordered potential and proves a new variational upper bound for the free energy via an estimation of noninteger moments of the partition function. For the copolymer model, under a restrictive condition on the law of the underlying renewal, it is shown that the critical point coincides with the one predicted via renormalization group arguments.