Tilted elastic lines with columnar and point disorder, non-Hermitian quantum mechanics, and spiked random matrices: Pinning and localization

We revisit the problem of an elastic line (such as a vortex line in a superconductor) subject to both columnar disorder and point disorder in dimension $d=1+1$. Upon applying a transverse field, a delocalization transition is expected, beyond which the line is tilted macroscopically. We investigate this transition in the fixed tilt angle ensemble and within a “one-way” model where backward jumps are neglected. From recent results about directed polymers in the mathematics literature, and their connections to random matrix theory, we find that for a single line and a single strong defect this transition in the presence of point disorder coincides with the Baik–Ben Arous–Péché (BBP) transition for the appearance of outliers in the spectrum of a perturbed random matrix in the Gaussian unitary ensemble. This transition is conveniently described in the polymer picture by a variational calculation. In the delocalized phase, the ground state energy exhibits Tracy-Widom fluctuations. In the localized phase we show, using the variational calculation, that the fluctuations of the occupation length along the columnar defect are described by $f_{\mathrm{KPZ}}$, a distribution which appears ubiquitously in the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang universality class. We then consider a smooth density of columnar defect energies. Depending on how this density vanishes at its lower edge we find either (i) a delocalized phase only or (ii) a localized phase with a delocalization transition. We analyze this transition which is an infinite-rank extension of the BBP transition. The fluctuations of the ground state energy of a single elastic line in the localized phase (for fixed columnar defect energies) are described by a Fredholm determinant based on a new kernel, closely related to the kernel describing the largest real eigenvalues of the real Ginibre ensemble. The case of many columns and many nonintersecting lines, relevant for the study of the Bose glass phase, is also analyzed. The ground state energy is obtained using free probability and the Burgers equation. Connections with recent results on the generalized Rosenzweig-Porter model suggest that the localization of many polymers occurs gradually upon increasing their lengths.