The mixing time for simple exclusion (Q997944)

Let \(G=( V,E) \) be a finite connected graph. An assignment of either a black ball or a white ball\ to each vertex in \(V\), the number of black balls being at most \(| V| /2,\)\ is called a configuration. The exclusion process on \(G\) is a configuration valued continuous time Markov chain that for each edge \(e\in E\) at rate \(1\), switches the balls at the endpoints of \(e\). Let \(\mathcal{C}\) denote the space of configurations and let \(K^{t}( x,\cdot)\), \(x\in \mathcal{C},\;t\geq 0\) be the transition kernel for the exclusion process. Then the mixing time for the latter is defined as \(\tau _{\text{mix}}=\inf \{ t:\| K^{t}( x,\cdot) -U\| <1/4\;\text{ for\;all}\;x\in \mathcal{C}\} \), where \(\| \cdot\| \) stands for the total variation distance and \(U\) is the uniform distribution over configurations. The author is concerned with bounding the mixing time for the special case where \(G\) is the \(d\)-dimensional torus \(\mathbb{Z}^{d}/L \mathbb{Z}^{d}\), and a tight bound of \(O( L^{2}\log k) \) is actually obtained for the process with \(k\leq L^{d}/2\) particles. The proof is based on an auxiliary Markov chain called the chameleon process that is of independent interest. It is also shown that the relaxation time (=inverse spectral gap) has a bound of \(O( L^{2}\log d) \), improving on the earlier bound \(O( L^{2}d) \) obtained by \textit{J. Quastel} [Commun. Pure Appl. Math. 45, No. 6, 623--679 (1992; Zbl 0769.60097)].