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A curiously slowly mixing Markov chain

Probability 2025-12-30 v2 Combinatorics Representation Theory

Abstract

We study a Markov chain with very different mixing rates depending on how mixing is measured. The chain is the "Burnside process on the hypercube C2nC_2^n." Started at the all-zeros state, it mixes in a bounded number of steps, no matter how large nn is, in 1\ell^1 and in 2\ell^2. And started at general xx, it mixes in at most logn\log n steps in 1\ell^1. But, in 2\ell^2, it takes nlogn\frac{n}{\log n} steps for most starting xx. The 2\ell^2 mixing results follow from an explicit diagonalization of the Markov chain into binomial-coefficient-valued eigenvectors.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2511.01245,
  title  = {A curiously slowly mixing Markov chain},
  author = {Persi Diaconis and Andrew Lin and Arun Ram},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2511.01245},
  year   = {2025}
}

Comments

Please feel free to make comments! (The connection to Schur--Weyl duality has been moved to a separate paper, and some results have been slightly improved.)

R2 v1 2026-07-01T07:18:37.789Z