On Reverse Hypercontractivity

We study the notion of reverse hypercontractivity. We show that reverse hypercontractive inequalities are implied by standard hypercontractive inequalities as well as by the modified log-Sobolev inequality. Our proof is based on a new comparison lemma for Dirichlet forms and an extension of the Stroock–Varopoulos inequality. A consequence of our analysis is that all simple operators L=Id−E as well as their tensors satisfy uniform reverse hypercontractive inequalities. That is, for all q < p < 1 and every positive valued function f for t ≥ log⁡(1−q)/(1−p) we have ∥e−tLf∥q ≥ ∥f∥p. This should be contrasted with the case of hypercontractive inequalities for simple operators where t is known to depend not only on p and q but also on the underlying space. The new reverse hypercontractive inequalities established here imply new mixing and isoperimetric results for short random walks in product spaces, for certain card-shufflings, for Glauber dynamics in high-temperatures spin systems as well as for queueing processes. The inequalities further imply a quantitative Arrow impossibility theorem for general product distributions and inverse polynomial bounds in the number of players for the non-interactive correlation distillation problem with m-sided dice.