The evolution of the mixing rate of a simple random walk on the giant component of a random graph

In this article we present a study of the mixing time of a random walk on the largest component of a supercritical random graph, also known as the giant component. We identify local obstructions that slow down the random walk, when the average degree d is at most O($ \sqrt{\ln n} $), proving that the mixing time in this case is Θ((n-d)2) asymptotically almost surely. As the average degree grows these become negligible and it is the diameter of the largest component that takes over, yielding mixing time Θ(n-d) a.a.s.. We proved these results during the 2003–04 academic year. Similar results but for constant d were later proved independently by Benjamini et al. in [3]. © 2008 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Random Struct. Alg., 2008 Most of this work was completed while the author was a research fellow at the School of Computer Science, McGill University.