Large deviations and wandering exponent for random walk in a dynamic beta environment

Abstract

Random walk in a dynamic i.i.d. beta random environment, conditioned to escape at an atypical velocity, converges to a Doob transform of the original walk. The Doob-transformed environment is correlated in time, i.i.d. in space and its marginal density function is a product of a beta density and a hypergeometric function. Under its averaged distribution, the transformed walk obeys the wandering exponent $2/3$ that agrees with Kardar–Parisi–Zhang universality. The harmonic function in the Doob transform comes from a Busemann-type limit and appears as an extremal in a variational problem for the quenched large deviation rate function.