Sharp uniform stability of the logarithmic Sobolev inequality on finite cycles and stability of the cubic Sobolev inequality

Source abstract

We determine the sharp uniform constant in the quartic stability estimate for the logarithmic Sobolev inequality on finite cycles. We equip $C_{n}=\mathbb{Z}/n\mathbb{Z}$ with the uniform probability measure, and we let $\mathcal{E}_{n}$ be the Dirichlet form of the simple random walk on $C_{n}$, normalized so that its spectral gap is one. Frank and Ivanisvili recently proved the sharp logarithmic Sobolev inequality $2\mathcal{E}_{n}(u)\geq \mathrm{Ent}(u^{2})$ for all $n\geq 4$. We prove that $2\mathcal{E}_{n}(u)-\mathrm{Ent}(u^{2})\geq \frac{1}{3}\Vert u-1\Vert _{2}^{4}$ for all $n\geq 4$ and all nonnegative $u$ with $\Vert u\Vert _{2}=1$. This is the sharp form, uniformly in $n$, of the quartic stability estimate of Xie and Zhang, who obtained the constant $\frac{1}{12}$. The same estimate holds on the circle and for the word-length energy on $C_{n}$. Among these models, the four-cycle is the only extremal one: on $C_{4}$ the constant $\frac{1}{3}$ is sharp but not attained, while on $C_{n}$ with $n\geq 5$ and on the circle the sharp constant is at least $\frac{1}{3}+c$, where $c>0$ does not depend on $n$. We also give explicit upper bounds for these sharp constants. Our second main result is a stability estimate for the cubic Sobolev inequality of Frank and Ivanisvili, which is the main step in their proof. It gives the quantitative version of this inequality expected by Frank and Ivanisvili, with the optimal powers of $\Vert u-1\Vert _{2}$: four on $C_{n}$ with $n\geq 5$ and on the circle, and six on $C_{4}$. Two key new ingredients of the proofs are a bound for the first Fourier coefficient of $u$ in terms of its mean, which holds because $u$ is nonnegative, and a sharp stability estimate for Gross's two-point logarithmic Sobolev inequality, with sharp constants in both the fourth and the sixth powers of the distance.