Revisiting Directed Polymers with heavy-tailed disorder

In this mostly numerical study, we reconsider the statistical properties of the ground state of a directed polymer in a d = 1 + 1 "hilly" disorder landscape, i.e., when the quenched disorder has power-law tails. When disorder is Gaussian, the polymer minimizes its total energy through a collective optimization, where the energy of each visited site only weakly contributes to the total. Conversely, a hilly landscape forces the polymer to distort and explore a larger portion of space to reach some particularly deep energy sites. As soon as the fifth moment of the disorder diverges, this mechanism radically changes the standard Kardar-Parisi-Zhang scaling behavior of the directed polymer, and new exponents prevail. After confirming again that the Flory argument accurately predicts these exponents in the tail-dominated phase, we investigate several other statistical features of the ground state that shed light on this unusual transition and on the accuracy of the Flory argument. We underline the theoretical challenge posed by this situation, which paradoxically becomes even more acute above the upper critical dimension.