Cutoff in separation for compact harmonic manifold

Abstract

We show that cutoff in separation occurs for Brownian motion in some families of compact harmonic manifolds. We compute the cutoff time and windows in four families of compact harmonic manifold namely S n , CP n , HP n and RP n (the first three families are the only families of compact simply connected harmonic manifolds, see [19]). The proof is based on sharp strong stationary times and sufficiently accurate asymptotic expansions of their means and variances.