© The London Mathematical Society
Comparison Theorems for the Spectral Gap of Diffusion Processes and Schrödinger Operators on an Interval
Department of Mathematics, Technion-Israel Institute of Technology Haifa 32000, Israel pinsky{at}math.technion.ac.il
Received 20 April 2004.
The spectral gaps and thus the exponential rates of convergence to equilibrium are compared for ergodic one-dimensional diffusions on an interval. One of the results may be thought of as the diffusion analogue of a recent result for the spectral gap of one-dimensional Schrödinger operators. The similarities and differences between spectral gap results for diffusions and for Schrödinger operators are also discussed.