Random walks on rings and modules

Abstract

We consider two natural models of random walks on a module $V$ over a finite commutative ring $R$ driven simultaneously by addition of random elements in $V$, and multiplication by random elements in $R$. In the coin-toss walk, either one of the two operations is performed depending on the flip of a coin. In the affine walk, random elements $a \in R,b \in V$ are sampled independently, and the current state $x$ is taken to $ax+b$. For both models, we obtain the complete spectrum of the transition matrix from the representation theory of the monoid of all affine maps on $V$ under a suitable hypothesis on the measure on $V$ (the measure on $R$ can be arbitrary).