Mixing time of critical Ising model on trees is polynomial in the height (Q981702)

This paper considers the single-site heath-bath Glauber dynamics for the Ising model on a regular finite \(b\)-ary tree with \(h\) levels, at or close to the inverse temperature \(\beta_c=\text{arctanh}(1/\sqrt b)\), which is the critical inverse temperature for the purity of the free-boundary condition state. It is known that for \(\beta<\beta_c\) the spectral gap of the generator of the dynamics is of order \(1\) (it does not grow with \(h\)) and is exponential in \(h\) if \(\beta>\beta_c\). Theorem 1 states that, for \(\beta=\beta_c\) and for arbitrary boundary conditions \(\tau\), the inverse spectral gap and the total-variation mixing time are upper bounded by a polynomial in \(h\) and the exponent of the polynomial is independent of both \(\tau\) and \(b\). Moreover, Theorem 2 extends this result to the critical window where \(\beta-\beta_c\) goes to zero when \(h\to\infty\). Loosely speaking, it is proven here that the inverse spectral gap and mixing time are upper bounded by \(\exp(const\times (\beta-\beta_c)h)\), which matches with the known exponential behavior when \(\beta>\beta_c\). Finally, in Theorem 3 is given a \textit{lower bound} on the inverse spectral gap (resp. mixing time), of order \(h^2\) (resp. \(h^3\)), always at \(\beta_c\) but with special boundary conditions (free b.c.). This disproves an earlier conjecture by N. Berger et al. (PTRF '05), according to which the inverse gap would be linear in \(h\).