Cutoff for a one-sided transposition shuffle

We introduce a new type of card shuffle called one-sided transpositions. At each step a card is chosen uniformly from the pack and then transposed with another card chosen uniformly from below it. This defines a random walk on the symmetric group generated by a distribution which is non-constant on the conjugacy class of transpositions. Nevertheless, we provide an explicit formula for all eigenvalues of the shuffle by demonstrating a useful correspondence between eigenvalues and standard Young tableaux. This allows us to prove the existence of a total-variation cutoff for the one-sided transposition shuffle at time $n\log n$. We also study a weighted generalisation of the shuffle which, in particular, allows us to recover the well known mixing time of the classical random transposition shuffle.

[1]  Nadia Lafrenière Eigenvalues of symmetrized shuffling operators , 2018, 1811.07196.

[2]  Yuval Peres,et al.  Shuffling by Semi-random Transpositions , 2004 .

[3]  R. Pinsky Cyclic to Random Transposition Shuffles , 2012, 1204.2081.

[4]  N. Berestycki,et al.  Effect of scale on long-range random graphs and chromosomal inversions , 2011, 1102.4479.

[5]  N. Berestycki,et al.  Cutoff for conjugacy-invariant random walks on the permutation group , 2014, 1410.4800.

[6]  Laurent Saloff-Coste,et al.  Random Walks on Finite Groups , 2004 .

[7]  P. Diaconis,et al.  Generating a random permutation with random transpositions , 1981 .

[8]  A. B. Dieker,et al.  Spectral analysis of random-to-random Markov chains , 2015 .

[9]  Partial mixing of semi-random transposition shuffles , 2013, 1302.2601.

[10]  Ofer Zeitouni,et al.  Mixing times for random k-cycles and coalescence-fragmentation chains , 2010, 1001.1894.

[11]  V. Climenhaga Markov chains and mixing times , 2013 .

[12]  H. Lacoin Mixing time and cutoff for the adjacent transposition shuffle and the simple exclusion , 2013, 1309.3873.

[13]  P. Diaconis Group representations in probability and statistics , 1988 .

[14]  Bruce E. Sagan,et al.  The symmetric group - representations, combinatorial algorithms, and symmetric functions , 2001, Wadsworth & Brooks / Cole mathematics series.

[15]  Oliver Matheau-Raven Random Walks on the Symmetric Group: Cutoff for One-sided Transposition Shuffles , 2020, 2012.05118.

[16]  G. James,et al.  The Representation Theory of the Symmetric Group , 2009 .