On the spectral gap of the Kac walk and other binary collision processes

We give a new and elementary computation of the spectral gap of the Kac walk on the N-sphere. The result is obtained as a by-product of a more general observation which allows to reduce the analysis of the spectral gap of an N-component system to that of the same system for N=3. The method applies to a number of random 'binary collision' processes with complete-graph structure, including non-homogeneous examples such as exclusion and colored exclusion processes with site disorder.