Sharp critical behavior for pinning models in a random correlated environment

This article investigates the effect for random pinning models of long range power-law decaying correlations in the environment. For a particular type of environment based on a renewal construction, we are able to sharply describe the phase transition from the delocalized phase to the localized one, giving the critical exponent for the (quenched) free-energy, and proving that at the critical point the trajectories are fully delocalized. These results contrast with what happens both for the pure model (i.e., without disorder) and for the widely studied case of Lid. disorder, where the relevance or irrelevance of disorder on the critical properties is decided via the so-called Harris Criterion (Harris, 1974) [21]. (c) 2011 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.