Cutoff profiles for quantum Lévy processes and quantum random transpositions (Q2159263)

The paper under review concerns the detailed study of asymptotics, or more precisely, the cut-off profiles, for distributions of natural quantum stochastic processes associated to compact quantum groups, continuing the work in [\textit{A. Freslon}, Probab. Theory Relat. Fields 174, No. 3--4, 731--760 (2019; Zbl 1432.46049)]. The authors focus on the so-called central states, which admit natural classical versions, given by restrictions to the character algebra of the quantum group in question (which for the examples studied happens to be commutative). The main result concerns the cut-off profile for the natural counterpart of the heat semigroup on the free orthogonal quantum group, which turns out to involve free Meixner distributions. The techniques employed come from a mixture of classical and free probability and require a delicate quantitative analysis of the behaviour of Chebyshev polynomials. The authors also establish analogous cut-off profiles in the context of free permutation groups, both for a heat-like semigroup and for random quantum transpositions.