Dorna Abdolazimi

We prove a strengthening of the trickle down theorem for partite complexes. Given a $(d+1)$-partite $d$-dimensional simplicial complex, we show that if "on average" the links of faces of co-dimension 2 are $\frac{1-\delta}{d}$-(one-sided) spectral expanders, then the link of any face of co-dimension $k$ is an $O(\frac{1-\delta}{k\delta})$-(one-sided) spectral expander, for all $3\leq k\leq d+1$. For an application, using our theorem as a black-box, we show that links of faces of co-dimension $k$ in recent constructions of bounded degree high dimensional expanders have spectral expansion at most $O(1/k)$ fraction of the spectral expansion of the links of the worst faces of co-dimension $2$.

Given a matroid $M=(E,{\cal I})$, and a total ordering over the elements $E$, a broken circuit is a circuit where the smallest element is removed and an NBC independent set is an independent set in ${\cal I}$ with no broken circuit. The set of NBC independent sets of any matroid $M$ define a simplicial complex called the broken circuit complex which has been the subject of intense study in combinatorics. Recently, Adiprasito, Huh and Katz showed that the face of numbers of any broken circuit complex form a log-concave sequence, proving a long-standing conjecture of Rota. We study counting and optimization problems on NBC bases of a generic matroid. We find several fundamental differences with the independent set complex: for example, we show that it is NP-hard to find the max-weight NBC base of a matroid or that the convex hull of NBC bases of a matroid has edges of arbitrary large length. We also give evidence that the natural down-up walk on the space of NBC bases of a matroid may not mix rapidly by showing that for some family of matroids it is NP-hard to count the number of NBC bases after certain conditionings.

We show that the natural Glauber dynamics mixes rapidly and generates a random proper edge-coloring of a graph with maximum degree $\Delta$ whenever the number of colors is at least $q\geq (\frac{10}{3} + \epsilon)\Delta$, where $\epsilon>0$ is arbitrary and the maximum degree satisfies $\Delta \geq C$ for a constant $C = C(\epsilon)$ depending only on $\epsilon$. For edge-colorings, this improves upon prior work \cite{Vig99, CDMPP19} which show rapid mixing when $q\geq (\frac{11}{3}-\epsilon_0 ) \Delta$, where $\epsilon_0 \approx 10^{-5}$ is a small fixed constant. At the heart of our proof, we establish a matrix trickle-down theorem, generalizing Oppenheim's influential result, as a new technique to prove that a high dimensional simplical complex is a local spectral expander.