Sharp Hypercontractivity for Global Functions

Abstract

For a function $f$ on the hypercube $\{0,1\}^n$ with Fourier expansion $f=\sum_{S\subseteq[n]}\hat f(S)\chi_S$, the hypercontractive inequality for the noise operator allows bounding norms of $T_\rho f=\sum_S\rho^{|S|}\hat f(S)\chi_S$ in terms of norms of $f$. If $f$ is Boolean-valued, the level-$d$ inequality allows bounding the norm of $f^{=d}=\sum_{|S|=d}\hat f(S)\chi_S$ in terms of $E[f]$. These two inequalities play a central role in analysis of Boolean functions and its applications. While both inequalities hold in a sharp form when the hypercube is endowed with the uniform measure, they do not hold for more general discrete product spaces. Finding a `natural' generalization was a long-standing open problem. In [P. Keevash et al., Global hypercontractivity and its applications, J. Amer. Math. Soc., to appear], a hypercontractive inequality for this setting was presented, that holds for functions which are `global' -- namely, are not significantly affected by a restriction of a small set of coordinates. This hypercontractive inequality is not sharp, which precludes applications to the symmetric group $S_n$ and to other settings where sharpness of the bound is crucial. Also, no level-$d$ inequality for global functions over general discrete product spaces is known. We obtain sharp versions of the hypercontractive inequality and of the level-$d$ inequality for this setting. Our inequalities open the way for diverse applications to extremal set theory and to group theory. We demonstrate this by proving quantitative bounds on the size of intersecting families of sets and vectors under weak symmetry conditions and by describing numerous applications to the study of functions on $S_n$ -- including hypercontractivity and level-$d$ inequalities, character bounds, variants of Roth's theorem and of Bogolyubov's lemma, and diameter bounds, that were obtained using our techniques