A fundamental and very well studied region of the Erdős–Rényi process is the phase transition at$m$∼$n$/2 edges in which a giant component suddenly appears. We examine the process beginning with an initial graph. We further examine the Bohman–Frieze process in which edges between isolated vertices are more likely. While the positions of the phase transitions vary, the three processes belong, roughly speaking, to the same universality class. In particular, the growth of the giant component in the barely supercritical region is linear in all cases.

We develop a new method for deriving local laws for a large class of random matrices. It is applicable to many matrix models built from sums and products of deterministic or independent random matrices. In particular, it may be used to obtain local laws for matrix ensembles that are \emph{anisotropic} in the sense that their resolvents are well approximated by deterministic matrices that are not multiples of the identity. For definiteness, we present the method for sample covariance matrices of the form Q:=TXX∗T∗, where T is deterministic and X is random with independent entries. We prove that with high probability the resolvent of Q is close to a deterministic matrix, with an optimal error bound and down to optimal spectral scales. As an application, we prove the edge universality of Q by establishing the Tracy-Widom-Airy statistics of the eigenvalues of Q near the soft edges. This result applies in the single-cut and multi-cut cases. Further applications include the distribution of the eigenvectors and an analysis of the outliers and BBP-type phase transitions in finite-rank deformations; they will appear elsewhere. We also apply our method to Wigner matrices whose entries have arbitrary expectation, i.e. we consider W+A where W is a Wigner matrix and a Hermitian deterministic matrix. We prove the anisotropic local law for W+A and use it to establish edge universality.

We derive the alternating arm exponents of the critical Ising model. We obtain six different patterns of alternating boundary arm exponents which correspond to the boundary conditions (⊖⊕), (⊖ free) and (free free), and the alternating interior arm exponents.

We investigate the energy landscape of the mixed even p-spin model with Ising spin configurations. We show that for any given energy level between zero and the maximal energy, with overwhelming probability there exist exponentially many distinct spin configurations such that their energies stay near this energy level. Furthermore, their magnetizations and overlaps are concentrated around some fixed constants. In particular, at the level of maximal energy, we prove that the Hamiltonian exhibits exponentially many orthogonal peaks. This improves the results of Chatterjee [20] and Ding-Eldan-Zhai [29], where the former established a logarithmic size of the number of the orthogonal peaks, while the latter proved a polynomial size. Our second main result obtains disorder chaos at zero temperature and at any external field. As a byproduct, this implies that the fluctuation of the maximal energy is superconcentrated when the external field vanishes and obeys a Gaussian limit law when the external field is present.

We analyse the spectrum of additive finite-rank deformations of $N \times N$ Wigner matrices $H$. The spectrum of the deformed matrix undergoes a transition, associated with the creation or annihilation of an outlier, when an eigenvalue $d_i$ of the deformation crosses a critical value $\pm 1$. This transition happens on the scale $|d_i| - 1 \sim N^{-1/3}$. We allow the eigenvalues $d_i$ of the deformation to depend on $N$ under the condition $|\abs{d_i} - 1| \geq (\log N)^{C \log \log N} N^{-1/3}$. We make no assumptions on the eigenvectors of the deformation. In the limit $N \to \infty$, we identify the law of the outliers and prove that the non-outliers close to the spectral edge have a universal distribution coinciding with that of the extremal eigenvalues of a Gaussian matrix ensemble. A key ingredient in our proof is the \emph{isotropic local semicircle law}, which establishes optimal high-probability bounds on the quantity $< v,[(H - z)^{-1} - m(z) 1] w >$, where $m(z)$ is the Stieltjes transform of Wigner's semicircle law and $v, w$ are arbitrary deterministic vectors.