Slowdown and neutral pockets for a random walk in random environment

We consider a d-dimensional random walk in random environment for which transition probabilities at each site are either neutral or present an effective drift “pointing to the right”. We obtain large deviation estimates on the probability that the walk moves in a too slow ballistic fashion, both under the annealed and quenched measures. These estimates underline the key role of large neutral pockets of the medium in the occurrence of slowdowns of the walk. Received: 12 March 1998 / Revised version: 19 February 1999