Coupling, spectral gap and related topics (Ⅲ)

Coupling, spectral gap and related topics (Ⅲ)

THIS is the last one of a series of three papers. Here, we discuss six topics related to the spectral gap: the gradient estimate, the heat kernel and Harnack inequality, the logarithmic Sobolev inequality, the convergence in total variation, the algebraic convergence and the infinite-dimensional case. The perturbation of spectral gap and the logarithmic Sobolev constant under a linear transform is given (Theorem 5). A new proof for computing the logarithmic Sobolev constant in a basic case is also presented (Theorem 7).