The Aldous property for normal Cayley graphs on symmetric groups

Abstract

Aldous' spectral gap conjecture states that the random walk and the interchange process on any connected graph have the same spectral gap, or, equivalently, the second largest eigenvalue of any connected Cayley graph on the symmetric group $S_n$ with respect to a set of transpositions is achieved by the standard representation of $S_n$. This celebrated conjecture, proved in its general form in 2010, has inspired much interest in searching for other Cayley graphs on $S_n$ possessing this property, now known as the Aldous property. In this paper, we first prove that for $n \ge 5$ at most one of a normal Cayley graph on $S_n$ and its complement can possess the Aldous property except when these two graphs are $2K_{n!/2}$ and $K_{n!/2,n!/2}$ respectively. We then determine, for sufficiently large $n$, all normal Cayley graphs $\mathrm{Cay}(S_n, S)$ that have the Aldous property, except for the case when $S$ contains a permutation with support size in $\{2, 3, \dots, n-2\}$ and a permutation with support size in $\{n-1, n\}$, but not all permutations with support size $n$ are contained in $S$. In particular, we show that a non-complete normal Cayley graph $\mathrm{Cay}(S_n, S)$ does not have the Aldous property if all permutations in $S$ have support size $n-1$ or $n$, or all permutations with support size $n$ are contained in $S$, thereby solving an open problem posed by Li, Xia and Zhou in 2023. Along the way we determine all normal Cayley graphs on $S_n$ that are line graphs, and classify all normal Cayley graphs on $S_n$ with the strictly second largest eigenvalue at most $1$.