Restricted hypercontractivity on the Poisson space

We show that the Ornstein-Uhlenbeck semigroup associated with a general Poisson random measure is hypercontractive, whenever it is restricted to non-increasing mappings on configuration spaces. We deduce from this result some versions of Talagrand's $L^1$-$L^2$ inequality for increasing and concave mappings, and we build examples showing that such an estimate represents a strict improvement of the classical Poincar\'e inequality. We complement our finding with several results of independent interest, such as gradient estimates.