Mixing times and moving targets

We consider irreducible Markov chains on a finite state space. We show that the mixing time of any such chain is equivalent to the maximum, over initial states $x$ and moving large sets $(A_s)_s$, of the hitting time of $(A_s)_s$ starting from $x$. We prove that in the case of the $d$-dimensional torus the maximum hitting time of moving targets is equal to the maximum hitting time of stationary targets. Nevertheless, we construct a transitive graph where these two quantities are not equal, resolving an open question of Aldous and Fill on a "cat and mouse" game

An isoperimetric inequality for the Wiener sausage

Let $(\xi(s))_{s\geq 0}$ be a standard Brownian motion in $d\geq 1$ dimensions and let $(D_s)_{s \geq 0}$ be a collection of open sets in $\R^d$. For each $s$, let $B_s$ be a ball centered at 0 with \vol(B_s) = \vol(D_s). We show that \E[\vol(\cup_{s \leq t}(\xi(s) + D_s))] \geq \E[\vol(\cup_{s \leq t}(\xi(s) + B_s))], for all $t$. In particular, this implies that the expected volume of the Wiener sausage increases when a drift is added to the Brownian motion

Martingale defocusing and transience of a self-interacting random walk

Suppose that $(X,Y,Z)$ is a random walk in $\mathbb{Z}^3$ that moves in the following way: on the first visit to a vertex only $Z$ changes by $\pm 1$ equally likely, while on later visits to the same vertex $(X,Y)$ performs a two-dimensional random walk step. We show that this walk is transient thus answering a question of Benjamini, Kozma and Schapira. One important ingredient of the proof is a dispersion result for martingales

Capacity of the range of random walk on Zd\mathbb{Z}^d

We study the capacity of the range of a transient simple random walk on $\mathbb{Z}^d$. Our main result is a central limit theorem for the capacity of the range for $d\ge 6$. We present a few open questions in lower dimensions

Quenched exit times for random walk on dynamical percolation

We consider random walk on dynamical percolation on the discrete torus $\mathbb{Z}_n^d$. In previous work, mixing times of this process for $p<p_c(\mathbb{Z}^d)$ were obtained in the annealed setting where one averages over the dynamical percolation environment. Here we study exit times in the quenched setting, where we condition on a typical dynamical percolation environment. We obtain an upper bound for all $p$ which for $p<p_c$ matches the known lower bound