On the Aldous-Caputo Spectral Gap Conjecture for Hypergraphs

Abstract: In their celebrated paper (arXiv:0906.1238), Caputo, Liggett and Richthammer proved Aldous' conjecture and showed that for an arbitrary finite graph, the spectral gap of the interchange process is equal to the spectral gap of the underlying random walk. A crucial ingredient in the proof was the Octopus Inequality - a certain inequality of operators in the group ring $\mathbb{R}[\mathrm{Sym}_n]$ of the symmetric group. Here we generalize the Octopus Inequality and apply it to generalize the Caputo-Liggett-Richthammer Theorem to certain hypergraphs, proving some cases of a conjecture of Caputo.