Diffusion budgets for contact-freezing lattice ellipsoids

Abstract

We study bounded-covariance matrix martingales whose ellipsoids acquire and retain lattice contacts. On a common set of Haar lattices of probability tending to one, we bound the total nonnegative gain in a heat-occupation frame by the time-averaged square-root diffusion cost. A cost of o(log d) forces this gain to vanish at the horizon (16 log d + 8 log log d + O(1))/d². The bound is uniform over admissible policies on each selected lattice and also gives an averaged-budget theorem. Its proof combines deterministic pair envelopes, radial and angular Haar estimates, same-noise coupling and a potential-weighted restart. Applications include every fixed-strength normalized curvature-preserving tilt and rotating low-rank feedback. We also solve the instantaneous curvature-preserving optimization problem with the same diffusion cost, including noncommuting curvature and occupation operators.