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I'm reading through the paper Poincaré type and spectral gap inequalities with fractional Laplacians on Hamming cube.

However, I'm having a difficult time understanding the following proof: Lemma 2.1 page 3).

I understand the general goal of the proof, but the second half in which we establish a lower bound for the integral contains several steps that I find puzzling. Where (and how) do we make use of the fact that $\eta=c_1^{0.1}$, and why was this specific value chosen? Where does the $\sqrt{3/4}$ come from? Why exactly does $0<\beta\leq 2$ imply that the smallness of $c_1$ is independent of $\beta$? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

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It looks to me like the authors just wanted to put in some ridiculous values which "are clearly sufficient" so that they don't have to work out the details.

The choice $\eta = c_1^{1/10}$ should ensure that the term $\int_{|g-1|\leq \eta} |g|^\beta \operatorname{sgn}(g) \, d\mu$ converges to 1 for $c_1 \rightarrow 0$, uniformly across all $g$ satisfying $\mathbb{E}[g^2] = 1$ and $\mathbb{E}[(g-\mathbb{E}[g])^2 \leq c_1$ and uniformly across all $\beta$ (this is where you need an upper bound on $\beta$). The term $\sqrt{3/4}$ is then just some value that is sufficiently close to 1 for the remainder of the proof.

To see this convergence, it suffices to show that $\mu(|g-1|\leq \eta)$ goes to 1 using, e.g., Chebyshev's inequality. To this end, we need to use the vague statement "$|1-\mathbb{E}[g]| \ll 1$", which should be made rigorous by establishing a bound on $|\mathbb{E}[g] - 1|$ only depending on $c_1$. I haven't worked out the details, but I guess something like $|\mathbb{E}[g] - 1| \leq f(c_1)$, where $f(x) \approx x^{1/2}$ seems reasonable. The choice of $\eta$ is now simply large enough such that \begin{align} \mu(|g-1| > \eta) \leq \mu(|g-\mathbb{E}[g]| > \eta - f(c_1)) \leq \mu(|g-\mathbb{E}[g]| > c_1^{1/3}) \rightarrow 0 \end{align} for $c_1 \rightarrow 0$, where of course the $1/3$ exponent is again a rather arbitrary choice by myself, as anything below $1/2$ should work.

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  • $\begingroup$ This was very helpful, thanks! I have one more question; in the last step, how do we know that the two integrals are small enough that the entire expression is $\geq 1/\{sqrt{2}}$? $\endgroup$
    – n3rl
    Commented Sep 29, 2022 at 19:44
  • $\begingroup$ The last two integrals simply converge to zero. I think that there is a lot of slack in the statement of the Lemma by not specifying $c_1$. For the term $2^{-1/\beta}$, I think any other constant $(1+\delta)$ instead of 2 would work as well where for arbitrarily small $c_1$, the $\delta$ also can be chosen smaller. The paper seems to side-step this precise weighing and simply takes $\delta=1$. $\endgroup$
    – Steve
    Commented Sep 30, 2022 at 6:34

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