Hitting time mixing for the random transposition walk

Abstract Consider shuffling a deck of n cards, labeled 1 through n, as follows: at each time step, pick one card uniformly with your right hand and another card, independently and uniformly with your left hand; then swap the cards. How long does it take until the deck is close to random? Diaconis and Shahshahani showed that this process undergoes cutoff in total variation distance at time t = (n n) /2 t = ⌊ (n log n) / 2 ⌋. Confirming a conjecture of N. Berestycki, we prove the definitive “hitting time” version of this result: let τ denote the first time at which all cards have been touched. The total variation distance between the stopped distribution at τ and the uniform distribution on permutations is o (1) ; this is best possible, since at time -1 τ - 1, the total variation distance is at least (1+o (1) ) e^-1 (1 + o (1) ) e - 1.