Cutoff for random Cayley graphs of nilpotent groups

We consider the random Cayley graphs of a sequence of finite nilpotent groups of diverging sizes $G=G(n)$, whose ranks and nilpotency classes are uniformly bounded. For some $k=k(n)$ such that $1\ll\log k \ll \log |G|$, we pick a random set of generators $S=S(n)$ by sampling $k$ elements $Z_1,\ldots,Z_k$ from $G$ uniformly at random with replacement, and set $S:=\{Z_j^{\pm 1}:1 \le j\le k \}$. We show that the simple random walk on Cay$(G,S)$ exhibits cutoff with high probability. Some of our results apply to a general set of generators. Namely, we show that there is a constant $c>0$, depending only on the rank and the nilpotency class of $G$, such that for all symmetric sets of generators $S$ of size at most $\frac{c\log |G|}{\log \log |G|}$, the spectral gap and the $\varepsilon$-mixing time of the simple random walk $X=(X_t)_{t\geq 0}$ on Cay$(G,S)$ are asymptotically the same as those of the projection of $X$ to the abelianization of $G$, given by $[G,G]X_t$. In particular, $X$ exhibits cutoff if and only if its projection does.