WELL-MIXING VERTICES AND ALMOST EXPANDERS

Abstract

We study regular graphs in which the random walks starting from a positive fraction of vertices have small mixing time. We prove that any such graph is virtually an expander and has no small separator. This answers a question of Pak [SODA: Proceedings of the Thirteenth Annual ACM-SIAM Symposium on Discrete Algorithms, Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, Philadelphia, PA, 2002, pp. 321-328]. As a corollary, it shows that sparse (constant degree) regular graphs with many well-mixing vertices have a long cycle, improving a result of Pak. Furthermore, such cycle can be found in polynomial time. Secondly, we show that if the random walks from a positive fraction of vertices are well-mixing, then the random walks from almost all vertices are well-mixing (with a slightly worse mixing time).