  A finite ergodic Markov chain is said to exhibit cutoff if its distance to
stationarity remains close to 1 over a certain number of iterations and then
abruptly drops to near 0 on a much shorter time scale. Discovered in the
context of card shuffling (Aldous-Diaconis, 1986), this phenomenon is now
believed to be rather typical among fast mixing Markov chains. Yet,
establishing it rigorously often requires a challengingly detailed
understanding of the underlying chain. Here we consider non-backtracking random
walks on random graphs with a given degree sequence. Under a general sparsity
condition, we establish the cutoff phenomenon, determine its precise window,
and prove that the (suitably rescaled) cutoff profile approaches a remarkably
simple, universal shape.
