View article

For general spin systems, we prove that a contractive coupling for an arbitrary local Markov chain implies optimal bounds on the mixing time and the modified log-Sobolev constant for a large class of Markov chains including the Glauber dynamics, arbitrary heat-bath block dynamics, and the Swendsen-Wang dynamics. This reveals a novel connection between probabilistic techniques for bounding the convergence to stationarity and analytic tools for analyzing the decay of relative entropy. As a corollary of our general results, we obtain O(n log n) mixing time and Ω(1/n) modified log-Sobolev constant of the Glauber dynamics for sampling random q-colorings of an n-vertex graph with constant maximum degree Δ when q > (11/6–∊₀)Δ for some fixed ∊₀ > 0. We also obtain O(log n) mixing time and Ω(1) modified log-Sobolev constant of the Swendsen-Wang dynamics for the ferromagnetic Ising model on an n-vertex …