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Journal of the American Mathematical Society

Published by the American Mathematical Society, the Journal of the American Mathematical Society (JAMS) is devoted to research articles of the highest quality in all areas of mathematics.

ISSN 1088-6834 (online) ISSN 0894-0347 (print)

The 2020 MCQ for Journal of the American Mathematical Society is 4.83.

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Proof of Aldous’ spectral gap conjecture
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by Pietro Caputo, Thomas M. Liggett and Thomas Richthammer
J. Amer. Math. Soc. 23 (2010), 831-851
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1090/S0894-0347-10-00659-4
Published electronically: January 26, 2010

Abstract:

Aldous’ spectral gap conjecture asserts that on any graph the random walk process and the random transposition (or interchange) process have the same spectral gap. We prove the conjecture using a recursive strategy. The approach is a natural extension of the method already used to prove the validity of the conjecture on trees. The novelty is an idea based on electric network reduction, which reduces the problem to the proof of an explicit inequality for a random transposition operator involving both positive and negative rates. The proof of the latter inequality uses suitable coset decompositions of the associated matrices with rows and columns indexed by permutations.
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Bibliographic Information
  • Pietro Caputo
  • Affiliation: Dipartimento di Matematica, Università di Roma Tre, Italy and Department of Mathematics, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095
  • MR Author ID: 659765
  • ORCID: 0000-0002-2871-2566
  • Email: caputo@mat.uniroma3.it
  • Thomas M. Liggett
  • Affiliation: Department of Mathematics, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095
  • Email: tml@math.ucla.edu
  • Thomas Richthammer
  • Affiliation: Department of Mathematics, University of California, Los Angeles, California 90095
  • Email: richthammer@math.ucla.edu
  • Received by editor(s): June 26, 2009
  • Published electronically: January 26, 2010
  • Additional Notes: The first author was partially supported by the Advanced Research Grant “PTRELSS” ADG-228032 of the European Research Council. He thanks Filippo Cesi for helpful discussions
    Partial support from NSF Grant DMS-0301795 is acknowledged
  • © Copyright 2010 American Mathematical Society
    The copyright for this article reverts to public domain 28 years after publication.
  • Journal: J. Amer. Math. Soc. 23 (2010), 831-851
  • MSC (2010): Primary 60K35, 60J27, 05C50
  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1090/S0894-0347-10-00659-4
  • MathSciNet review: 2629990