ERC Consolidator Grant · 2023
Elucidating the cutoff phenomenon
The cutoff phenomenon is an abrupt transition from out of equilibrium to equilibrium undergone by certain Markov processes in the limit where the size of the state space tends to infinity: instead of decaying gradually over time, their distance to equilibrium remains close to the maximal value for a while and suddenly drops to zero as the time parameter reaches a critical threshold known as the mixing time. Discovered four decades ago in the context of card shuffling, this dynamical phase transition has since then been observed in a variety of situations, from random walks on random graphs to high-temperature spin glasses. It is now believed to be universal among fast-mixing…
From the public funding record at EU CORDIS. Describes the funded project, not the reviews below.