An entropic approach for Hamiltonian Monte Carlo: The idealized case

Quantitative long-time entropic convergence and short-time regularization are established for an idealized Hamiltonian Monte Carlo chain which alternatively follows an Hamiltonian dynamics for a fixed time and then partially or totally refreshes its velocity with an auto-regressive Gaussian step. These results, in discrete time, are the analogous of similar results for the continuous-time kinetic Langevin diffusion, and the latter can be obtained from our bounds in a suitable limit regime. The dependency in the log-Sobolev constant of the target measure is sharp and is illustrated on a mean-field case and on a low-temperature regime, with an application to the simulated annealing algorithm. The practical unadjusted algorithm is briefly discussed.