The mixing time of the Newman--Watts small world

"Small worlds" are large systems in which any given node has only a few connections to other points, but possessing the property that all pairs of points are connected by a short path, typically logarithmic in the number of nodes. The use of random walks for sampling a uniform element from a large state space is by now a classical technique; to prove that such a technique works for a given network, a bound on the mixing time is required. However, little detailed information is known about the behaviour of random walks on small-world networks, though many predictions can be found in the physics literature. The principal contribution of this paper is to show that for a famous small-world random graph model known as the Newman--Watts small world, the mixing time is of order (log n)^2. This confirms a prediction of Richard Durrett, who proved a lower bound of order (log n)^2 and an upper bound of order (log n)^3.

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