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Polynomial inequalities on the Hamming cube

Let $(X,\|\cdot\|_X)$ be a Banach space. The purpose of this article is to systematically investigate dimension independent properties of vector valued functions $f:\{-1,1\}^n\to X$ on the Hamming cube whose spectrum is bounded above or below. Our proofs exploit contractivity properties of the heat flow, induced by the geometry of the target space $(X,\|\cdot\|_X)$, combined with duality arguments and suitable tools from approximation theory and complex analysis. We obtain a series of improvements of various well-studied estimates for functions with bounded spectrum, including moment comparison results for low degree Walsh polynomials and Bernstein-Markov type inequalities, which constitute discrete vector valued analogues of Freud's inequality in Gauss space (1971). Many of these inequalities are new even for scalar valued functions. Furthermore, we provide a short proof of Mendel and Naor's heat smoothing theorem (2014) for functions on tail spaces with values in spaces of nontrivial type and we also prove a dual lower bound on the decay of the heat semigroup acting on functions with spectrum bounded from above. Finally, we improve the reverse Bernstein-Markov inequalities of Meyer (1984) and Mendel and Naor (2014) for functions with narrow enough spectrum and improve the bounds of Filmus, Hatami, Keller and Lifshitz (2016) on the $\ell_p$ sums of influences of bounded functions for $p\in\big(1,\frac{4}{3}\big)$.