Directed Polymers on a Factorized Disorder Landscape

Abstract

We study the Directed Polymer model subject to a particular form of disorder, $η(x,t)=η_X(x) η_T(t)$, recently proposed in biological applications. We find that two new universality classes arise, depending on the the lattice geometry. Using an intermediate model linking the two different orientations continuously, we find that there is a phase transition separating two distinct scaling phases. For both phases we get a reasonable understanding of the nature and values of the exponents, corroborated with numerical results.