Renewal convergence rates and correlation decay for homogeneous pinning models

Abstract

A class of discrete renewal processes with exponentially decaying inter-arrival distributions coincides with the infinite volume limit of general homogeneous pinning models in their localized phase. Pinning models are statistical mechanics systems to which a lot of attention has been devoted both for their relevance for applications and because they are solvable models exhibiting a non-trivial phase transition. The spatial decay of correlations in these systems is directly mapped to the speed of convergence to equilibrium for the associated renewal processes. We show that close to criticality, under general assumptions, the correlation decay rate, or the renewal convergence rate, coincides with the inter-arrival decay rate. We also show that, in general, this is false away from criticality. Under a stronger assumption on the inter-arrival distribution we establish a local limit theorem, capturing thus the sharp asymptotic behavior of correlations.