Les fonctions sphériques d'un couple de Gelfand symétrique et les chaînes de Markov

Abstract

After an elementary description of Gelfand pairs, spherical functions and Plancherel measure, some explicit computations on the related Markov chains are performed. Random walks on polyhedra belong to this class of Markov chains; two more examples of chains on graphs are worked out, and the necessary and sufficient condition of transcience of random walks on p-adic numbers with spherical symmetry is given as an application of the techniques of the paper.