The cutoff phenomenon describes a sharp transition in the convergence of an
ergodic finite Markov chain to equilibrium. Of particular interest is
understanding this convergence for the simple random walk on a bounded-degree
expander graph. The first example of a family of bounded-degree graphs where
the random walk exhibits cutoff in total-variation was provided only very
recently, when the authors showed this for a typical random regular graph.
However, no example was known for an explicit (deterministic) family of
expanders with this phenomenon. Here we construct a family of cubic expanders
where the random walk from a worst case initial position exhibits
total-variation cutoff. Variants of this construction give cubic expanders
without cutoff, as well as cubic graphs with cutoff at any prescribed
time-point.Comment: 17 pages, 2 figure