text: We study asymptotic behaviors of the free energy for the directed polymer in random environment. The polymer is allowed to make unbounded jumps and the environment is given by the Bernoulli variables. We first establish the existence and continuity including the negative infinity value of the coupling constant β. Our proof of existence at β=−∞ differs from existing ones in that it avoids the direct use of subadditivity. Secondly, we identify the asymptotics of the free energy at β=−∞ in the limit of the success probability of the Bernoulli variables tending to one. It is described by using the so-called time constant of a certain directed first passage percolation. Our proof relies on a certain continuity property of the time constant, which is of independent interest.
  @cite_0: We prove a formula conjectured in [14] for the free energy density of a directed polymer in a Brownian environment in 1+1 dimensions.
  @cite_1: We study a (1 + 1)-dimensional directed polymer in a random environment on the integer lattice with log-gamma distributed weights. Among directed polymers, this model is special in the same way as the last-passage percolation model with exponential or geometric weights is special among growth models, namely, both permit explicit calculations. With appropriate boundary conditions, the polymer with log-gamma weights satisfies an analogue of Burke’s theorem for queues. Building on this, we prove the conjectured values for the fluctuation exponents of the free energy and the polymer path, in the case where the boundary conditions are present and both endpoints of the polymer path are fixed. For the polymer without boundary conditions and with either fixed or free endpoint, we get the expected upper bounds on the exponents.
  @cite_10: We consider the solution of the stochastic heat equation @TZ D 1 @ 2 X ZZ P W with delta function initial condition Z.T D0;X DiXD0 whose logarithm, with appropriate normalization, is the free energy of the con- tinuum directed polymer, or the Hopf-Cole solution of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang equation with narrow wedge initial conditions. We obtain explicit formulas for the one-dimensional marginal distributions, the crossover distributions, which interpolate between a standard Gaussian dis- tribution (small time) and the GUE Tracy-Widom distribution (large time). The proof is via a rigorous steepest-descent analysis of the Tracy-Widom formula for the asymmetric simple exclusion process with antishock initial data, which is shown to converge to the continuum equations in an appropriate weakly asymmetric limit. The limit also describes the crossover behavior between the symmetric and asymmetric exclusion processes. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.
summary: Finally, we mention that some have been found recently, see, e.g., Moriarty--O'Connell @cite_0 , Amir--Corwin--Quastel @cite_10 and Sepp "a l "a inen @cite_1 . In these models the free energy can be explicitly computed, thus allowing to study various asymptotics. But we refrain from explaining the details of these results since such examples have been found only in @math -dimension so far and also the techniques employed are quite different from ours.