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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Howes, Michael
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01058
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author Howes, Michael
author_facet Howes, Michael
contents This article gives sharp estimates for the mixing time of the Burnside process for Sylow $p$-double cosets in the symmetric group $S_n$. This process is a Markov chain on $S_n$ which can be used to uniformly sample Sylow $p$-double cosets. The analysis applies when $n = pk$ with $p$ prime and $k < p$. The main result describes the limit profile of the distance to the stationary distribution as $p$ goes to infinity. From the limit profile, we get the following two corollaries. First, if $k$ remains fixed as $p \to \infty$, then order $p$ steps are necessary and sufficient for mixing and cut-off does not occur. Second, if $k \to \infty$ as $p \to \infty$, then cut-off occurs at $p \log k$ with a window of size $p$. The limit profile is derived from explicit upper and lower bounds on the distance between the Burnside process and its stationary distribution. These non-asymptotic bounds give very accurate approximations even for $p$ as small as 11.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_01058
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Limit profiles and cutoff for the Burnside process on Sylow double cosets
Howes, Michael
Probability
60J10
This article gives sharp estimates for the mixing time of the Burnside process for Sylow $p$-double cosets in the symmetric group $S_n$. This process is a Markov chain on $S_n$ which can be used to uniformly sample Sylow $p$-double cosets. The analysis applies when $n = pk$ with $p$ prime and $k < p$. The main result describes the limit profile of the distance to the stationary distribution as $p$ goes to infinity. From the limit profile, we get the following two corollaries. First, if $k$ remains fixed as $p \to \infty$, then order $p$ steps are necessary and sufficient for mixing and cut-off does not occur. Second, if $k \to \infty$ as $p \to \infty$, then cut-off occurs at $p \log k$ with a window of size $p$. The limit profile is derived from explicit upper and lower bounds on the distance between the Burnside process and its stationary distribution. These non-asymptotic bounds give very accurate approximations even for $p$ as small as 11.
title Limit profiles and cutoff for the Burnside process on Sylow double cosets
topic Probability
60J10
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.01058