The cutoff phenomenon for Ehrenfest chains

AbstractWe consider families of Ehrenfest chains and provide a simple criterion on the Lp-cutoff and the Lp-precutoff with specified initial states for 1≤p<∞. For the family with an Lp-cutoff, a cutoff time is described and a possible window is given. For the family without an Lp-precutoff, the exact order of the Lp-mixing time is determined. The result is consistent with the well-known conjecture on cutoffs of Markov chains proposed by Peres in 2004, which says that a cutoff exists if and only if the multiplication of the spectral gap and the mixing time tends to infinity