Fractional moments of the Stochastic Heat Flow and 2D Directed Polymers

Abstract

We estimate the fractional moments of the normalized mass assigned by the Critical 2D Stochastic Heat Flow to small balls. Our results also cover the discrete case corresponding to the 2D directed polymer model and provide estimates that are uniform in all parameters. One key takeaway of our results is that the vanishing of the fractional moments is completely governed by the divergence of the second moment. We use a quite robust method, by refining the change of measure argument and introducing a novel coarse-graining procedure, reducing the proof to essentially second moment estimates (in fact, we also provide sharp second moment estimates for directed polymers, of independent interest).