Commutativity in a Poincaré-Type Inequality

We study a Poincaré-type inequality for Gaussian measures restricted to origin-symmetric convex sets. The inequality arises from the second variation at $t=0$ of the function $t⟼{\gamma }_{\mathrm{\Sigma }}\left(e^{tA}K\right)$, where $\mathrm{\Sigma }$ and $A$ are symmetric matrices. The relevance of this function comes from Saroglou’s reformulation of the log-Brunn–Minkowski conjecture. We show that $\mathrm{\Sigma }$ and $A$ commute if and only if the inequality holds for every box of the form $UD{B}_{\mathrm{\infty }}^n$, where $U$ is orthogonal and $D$ is diagonal. In the non-commuting case, this yields counterexamples for orthogonal boxes whose axes can be chosen arbitrarily close to the coordinate axes. We also show that the inequality holds when $K$ is unconditional with respect to an eigenbasis of $\mathrm{\Sigma }$ and $A$ is an arbitrary symmetric matrix.