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Phase Transition for Glauber Dynamics for Independent Sets on Regular Trees

We study the effect of boundary conditions on the relaxation time of the Glauber dynamics for the hard-core model on the tree. The hard-core model is defined on the set of independent sets weighted by a parameter $λ$, called the activity. The Glauber dynamics is the Markov chain that updates a randomly chosen vertex in each step. On the infinite tree with branching factor $b$, the hard-core model can be equivalently defined as a broadcasting process with a parameter $ω$ which is the positive solution to $λ=ω(1+ω)^b$, and vertices are occupied with probability $ω/(1+ω)$ when their parent is unoccupied. This broadcasting process undergoes a phase transition between the so-called reconstruction and non-reconstruction regions at $ω_r\approx \ln{b}/b$. Reconstruction has been of considerable interest recently since it appears to be intimately connected to the efficiency of local algorithms on locally tree-like graphs, such as sparse random graphs. In this paper we show that the relaxation time of the Glauber dynamics on regular $b$-ary trees $T_h$ of height $h$ and $n$ vertices, undergoes a phase transition around the reconstruction threshold. In particular, we construct a boundary condition for which the relaxation time slows down at the reconstruction threshold. More precisely, for any $ω\le \ln{b}/b$, for $T_h$ with any boundary condition, the relaxation time is $Ω(n)$ and $O(n^{1+o_b(1)})$. In contrast, above the reconstruction threshold we show that for every $δ>0$, for $ω=(1+δ)\ln{b}/b$, the relaxation time on $T_h$ with any boundary condition is $O(n^{1+δ+ o_b(1)})$, and we construct a boundary condition where the relaxation time is $Ω(n^{1+δ/2 - o_b(1)})$.