Mixing time of critical Ising model on trees is polynomial in the height

Abstract

In the heat-bath Glauber dynamics for the Ising model on the lattice, physicists believe that the spectral gap of the continuous-time chain exhibits the following behavior. For some critical inverse-temperature $β_c$, the inverse-gap is bounded for $β< β_c$, polynomial in the surface area for $β= β_c$ and exponential in it for $β> β_c$. This has been proved for $\Z^2$ except at criticality. So far, the only underlying geometry where the critical behavior has been confirmed is the complete graph. Recently, the dynamics for the Ising model on a regular tree, also known as the Bethe lattice, has been intensively studied. The facts that the inverse-gap is bounded for $β< β_c$ and exponential for $β> β_c$ were established, where $β_c$ is the critical spin-glass parameter, and the tree-height $h$ plays the role of the surface area. In this work, we complete the picture for the inverse-gap of the Ising model on the $b$-ary tree, by showing that it is indeed polynomial in $h$ at criticality. The degree of our polynomial bound does not depend on $b$, and furthermore, this result holds under any boundary condition. We also obtain analogous bounds for the mixing-time of the chain. In addition, we study the near critical behavior, and show that for $β> β_c$, the inverse-gap and mixing-time are both $\exp[Θ((β-β_c) h)]$.