### Probability and Combinatorics

Tuesday, October 26, 2021 - 3:30pm

#### Jonathon Peterson

Purdue University

Location

Temple University

Wachman Hall 617

Random walks in cooling random environments are a model of random walks in dynamic random environments where the random environment is re-sampled at a fixed sequence of times (called the cooling sequence) and the environment remains constant between these re-sampling times. We study the limiting distributions of the walk in the case when distribution on environments is such that a walk in a fixed environment has an $s$-stable limiting distribution for some $s \in (1,2)$. It was previously conjectured that for cooling maps whose gaps between re-sampling times grow polynomially that the model should exhibit a phase transition from Gaussian limits to $s$-stable depending on the exponent of the polynomial growth of the re-sampling gaps. We confirm this conjecture, identifying the precise exponent at which the phase transition occurs and proving that at the critical exponent the limiting distribution is a generalized tempered $s$-stable distribution. The proofs require us to prove some previously unknown facts about one-dimensional random walks in random environments which are of independent interest.