The $k$-cycle shuffling with repeated cards
Abstract
We investigate the -cycle shuffle on repeated cards, namely on a deck consisting of identical copies of each of card types, with total size . We establish asymptotic results for the total variation mixing of this shuffle, including cutoff and explicit limiting profiles. For fixed , we show that the walk exhibits cutoff at time with window of order , and we identify the limiting profile in terms of the total variation distance between Poisson distributions arising from quotient fixed-point statistics. When with sufficiently slow growth, more precisely when , we prove that the cutoff location shifts to , again with window of order , and that the limiting profile is asymptotically Gaussian, arising from a Poisson comparison after normal approximation. The proof is based on an approximation of the shuffling measure by an explicitly tractable auxiliary measure, generalizing the case from Jain and Sawhney (arXiv:2410.23944). The representation-theoretic framework underlying the analysis of this auxiliary measure follows from the work of Hough (arXiv:1605.00911) and Nestoridi and Olesker-Taylor (arXiv:2005.13437)
Cite
@article{arxiv.2603.27433,
title = {The $k$-cycle shuffling with repeated cards},
author = {Jiahe Shen},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2603.27433},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
19 pages. Comments welcome!