Mixing times for exclusion processes on hypergraphs

Abstract

We introduce a natural extension of the exclusion process to hypergraphs and prove an upper bound for its mixing time. In particular we show the existence of a constant $C$ such that for any connected, regular hypergraph $G$ within some natural class, the $\varepsilon$-mixing time of the exclusion process on $G$ with any feasible number of particles can be upper-bounded by $CT_{\text{EX}(2,G)}\log(|V|/\varepsilon)$, where $|V|$ is the number of vertices in $G$ and $T_{\text{EX}(2,G)}$ is the 1/4-mixing time of the corresponding exclusion process with just two particles. Moreover we show this is optimal in the sense that there exist hypergraphs in the same class for which $T_{\mathrm{EX}(2,G)}$ and the mixing time of just one particle are not comparable. The proofs involve an adaptation of the chameleon process, a technical tool invented by Morris and developed by Oliveira for studying the exclusion process on a graph.