Consider $N\times N$ hermitian or symmetric random matrices $H$ with independent entries, where the distribution of the $(i,j)$ matrix element is given by the probability measure $\nu_{ij}$ with zero expectation and with variance $\sigma_{ij}^2$. We assume that the variances satisfy the normalization condition $\sum_{i} \sigma^2_{ij} = 1$ for all $j$ and that there is a positive constant $c$ such that $c\le N \sigma_{ij}^2 \le c^{-1}$. We further assume that the probability distributions $\nu_{ij}$ have a uniform subexponential decay. We prove that the Stieltjes transform of the empirical eigenvalue distribution of $H$ is given by the Wigner semicircle law uniformly up to the edges of the spectrum with an error of order $ (N \eta)^{-1}$ where $\eta$ is the imaginary part of the spectral parameter in the Stieltjes transform. There are three corollaries to this strong local semicircle law: (1) Rigidity of eigenvalues: If $\gamma_j =\gamma_{j,N}$ denotes the {\it classical location} of the $j$-th eigenvalue under the semicircle law ordered in increasing order, then the $j$-th eigenvalue $\lambda_j$ is close to $\gamma_j$ in the sense that for any $\xi>1$ there is a constant $L$ such that \[\mathbb P \Big (\exists \, j : \; |\lambda_j-\gamma_j| \ge (\log N)^L \Big [ \min \big (\, j, N-j+1 \, \big) \Big ]^{-1/3} N^{-2/3} \Big) \le C\exp{\big[-c(\log N)^{\xi} \big]} \] for $N$ large enough. (2) The proof of the {\it Dyson's conjecture} \cite{Dy} which states that the time scale of the Dyson Brownian motion to reach local equilibrium is of order $N^{-1}$. (3) The edge universality holds in the sense that the probability distributions of the largest (and the smallest) eigenvalues of two generalized Wigner ensembles are the same in the large $N$ limit provided that the second moments of the two ensembles are identical.

We use the known convergence of loop-erased random walk to radial SLE(2) to give a new proof that the scaling limit of loop-erased random walk excursion in the upper half-plane is chordal SLE(2). Our proof relies on a version of Wilson’s algorithm for weighted graphs which is used together with a Beurling-type estimate for random walk excursion. We also establish and use the convergence of the radial SLE path to the chordal SLE path as the bulk point tends to a boundary point. In the final section we sketch how to extend our results to more general simply connected domains.

We consider sample covariance matrices of the form $X^*X$, where $X$ is an $M times N$ matrix with independent random entries. We prove the isotropic local Marchenko-Pastur law, i.e. we prove that the resolvent $(X^* X - z)^{-1}$ converges to a multiple of the identity in the sense of quadratic forms. More precisely, we establish sharp high-probability bounds on the quantity $langle v, (X^* X - z)^{-1} w rangle - langle v,w rangle m(z)$, where $m$ is the Stieltjes transform of the Marchenko-Pastur law and $v, w in mathbb C^N$. We require the logarithms of the dimensions $M$ and $N$ to be comparable. Our result holds down to scales $Im z geq N^{-1+epsilon}$ and throughout the entire spectrum away from 0. We also prove analogous results for generalized Wigner matrices.

We derive the joint asymptotic distribution of the outlier eigenvalues of an additively deformed Wigner matrix $H$. Our only assumptions on the deformation are that its rank be fixed and its norm bounded. Our results extend those of [The isotropic semicircle law and deformation of Wigner matrices. Preprint] by admitting overlapping outliers and by computing the joint distribution of all outliers. In particular, we give a complete description of the failure of universality first observed in [Ann. Probab. 37 (2009) 1-47; Ann. Inst. Henri Poincar\'{e} Probab. Stat. 48 (1013) 107-133; Free convolution with a semi-circular distribution and eigenvalues of spiked deformations of Wigner matrices. Preprint]. We also show that, under suitable conditions, outliers may be strongly correlated even if they are far from each other. Our proof relies on the isotropic local semicircle law established in [The isotropic semicircle law and deformation of Wigner matrices. Preprint]. The main technical achievement of the current paper is the joint asymptotics of an arbitrary finite family of random variables of the form $\langle\mathbf{v},(H-z)^{-1}\mathbf{w}\rangle$.

We consider a general class of $N\times N$ random matrices whose entries $h_{ij}$ are independent up to a symmetry constraint, but not necessarily identically distributed. Our main result is a local semicircle law which improves previous results [14] both in the bulk and at the edge. The error bounds are given in terms of the basic small parameter of the model, $\max_{i,j} \E \abs{h_{ij}}^2$. As a consequence, we prove the universality of the local $n$-point correlation functions in the bulk spectrum for a class of matrices whose entries do not have comparable variances, including random band matrices with band width $W\gg N^{1-\e_n}$ with some $\e_n>0$ and with a negligible mean-field component. In addition, we provide a coherent and pedagogical proof of the local semicircle law, streamlining and strengthening previous arguments from [17,19,6].