Glauber dynamics on trees: Boundary conditions and mixing time (Q1766910)

The authors analyze the influence of boundary conditions on the Glauber dynamics for discrete spin models on a regular rooted tree. Although they focus for simplicity on the known Ising model, the used techniques can be applied to other models, not necessarily ferromagnetic and with hard-core constraints. It is shown that the spectral gap and the log-Sobolev constant for the Glauber dynamics on an \(n\)-vertex regular tree with (+)-boundary at all temperatures and external fields are bounded below. In contrast to the free boundary case this gives that the mixing time is \(O(\log n)\). For the case when the mixing time is insensitive to the boundary condition the used methods allow to obtain more stronger results for the spectral gap and log-Sobolev constant.