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Separation cut-offs for birth and death chains. (English) Zbl 1127.60081
Summary: This paper gives a necessary and sufficient condition for a sequence of birth and death chains to converge abruptly to stationarity, that is, to present a cut-off. The condition involves the notions of spectral gap and mixing time. Y. Peres has observed that for many families of Markov chains, there is a cut-off if and only if the product of spectral gap and mixing time tends to infinity. We establish this for arbitrary birth and death chains in continuous time when the convergence is measured in separation and the chains all start at 0.

##### MSC:
 60J80 Branching processes (Galton-Watson, birth-and-death, etc.) 60B10 Convergence of probability measures 60J05 Discrete-time Markov processes on general state spaces 60J27 Continuous-time Markov processes on discrete state spaces
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