English

On the spectral gap of the Kac walk and other binary collision processes

Probability 2010-10-05 v1 Mathematical Physics math.MP

Abstract

We give a new and elementary computation of the spectral gap of the Kac walk on the N-sphere. The result is obtained as a by-product of a more general observation which allows to reduce the analysis of the spectral gap of an N-component system to that of the same system for N=3. The method applies to a number of random 'binary collision' processes with complete-graph structure, including non-homogeneous examples such as exclusion and colored exclusion processes with site disorder.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.0807.3415,
  title  = {On the spectral gap of the Kac walk and other binary collision processes},
  author = {Pietro Caputo},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:0807.3415},
  year   = {2010}
}

Comments

19 pages; to be published in ALEA, Latin American Journal Of Probability And Mathematical Statistics

R2 v1 2026-06-21T11:02:59.662Z