Optimal relaxation for Witten Lindbladians

Abstract

We prove optimal trace-norm relaxation for the one-dimensional Lindbladian associated with the Witten differential $a=h\partial_x+V'$ which annihilates the classical Gibbs density: if $λ_1(h)$ is the first positive eigenvalue of $H=a^*a$, then the relaxation rate is $γ_h=λ_1(h)/(2h)$. It applies to initial operators whose Schwartz kernels, after a Gibbs conjugation, satisfy $ L^2 $ estimates for the restriction to the diagonal and for the normal derivative. An appendix by Chat GPT 6 presents a stronger result specialised to positive initial data.