Random walks on wreath products and spectral gaps for coloured interchange processes

Abstract

We introduce group-valued coloured interchange processes, a class of continuous-time random walks on wreath products generated by transpositions and arbitrary symmetric base-group transitions. We give a complete representation-theoretic characterisation of their spectral gaps by decomposing the associated quasi-regular representation and determining precisely which irreducible representations are required. For abelian base groups, we realise these representations on multislices and identify their Laplacians with discrete Schr\"odinger operators. We then classify the minimal families of irreducible representations that determine the spectral gap for every choice of transition rates.