Consider $N\times N$ Hermitian or symmetric random matrices $H$ where the distribution of the $(i,j)$ matrix element is given by a probability measure $\nu_{ij}$ with a subexponential decay. Let $\sigma_{ij}^2$ be the variance for the probability measure $\nu_{ij}$ with the normalization property that $\sum_{i} \sigma^2_{ij} = 1$ for all $j$. Under essentially the only condition that $c\le N \sigma_{ij}^2 \le c^{-1}$ for some constant $c>0$, we prove that, in the limit $N \to \infty$, the eigenvalue spacing statistics of $H$ in the bulk of the spectrum coincide with those of the Gaussian unitary or orthogonal ensemble (GUE or GOE). We also show that for band matrices with bandwidth $M$ the local semicircle law holds to the energy scale $M^{-1}$.

We consider the ensemble of adjacency matrices of Erdős–Rényi random graphs, that is, graphs on $N$ vertices where every edge is chosen independently and with probability $p\equiv p(N)$. We rescale the matrix so that its bulk eigenvalues are of order one. We prove that, as long as $pN\to\infty$ (with a speed at least logarithmic in $N$), the density of eigenvalues of the Erdős–Rényi ensemble is given by the Wigner semicircle law for spectral windows of length larger than $N^{-1}$ (up to logarithmic corrections). As a consequence, all eigenvectors are proved to be completely delocalized in the sense that the $\ell^{\infty}$-norms of the $\ell^{2}$-normalized eigenvectors are at most of order $N^{-1/2}$ with a very high probability. The estimates in this paper will be used in the companion paper [Spectral statistics of Erdős–Rényi graphs II: Eigenvalue spacing and the extreme eigenvalues (2011) Preprint] to prove the universality of eigenvalue distributions both in the bulk and at the spectral edges under the further restriction that $pN\gg N^{2/3}$.

We present a generalization of the method of the local relaxation flow to establish the universality of local spectral statistics of a broad class of large random matrices. We show that the local distribution of the eigenvalues coincides with the local statistics of the corresponding Gaussian ensemble provided the distribution of the individual matrix element is smooth and the eigenvalues ${x_j}_{j=1}^N$ are close to their classical location ${\gamma_j}_{j=1}^N$ determined by the limiting density of eigenvalues. Under the scaling where the typical distance between neighboring eigenvalues is of order 1/N, the necessary apriori estimate on the location of eigenvalues requires only to know that $\E |x_j - \gamma_j |^2 \le N^{-1-\e}$ on average. This information can be obtained by well established methods for various matrix ensembles. We demonstrate the method by proving local spectral universality for Wishart matrices.

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In this paper, we prove a necessary and sufficient condition for Tracy-Widom law of Wigner matrices. Consider N×N symmetric Wigner matrices H with Hij=N−1/2xij, whose upper right entries xij (1≤i<j≤N) are i.i.d. random variables with distribution μ and diagonal entries xii (1≤i≤N) are i.i.d. random variables with distribution $\wt \mu$. The means of μ and $\wt \mu$ are zero, the variance of μ is 1, and the variance of $\wt \mu$ is finite. We prove that Tracy-Widom law holds if and only if $\lim_{s\to \infty}s^4\p(|x_{12}| \ge s)=0$. The same criterion holds for Hermitian Wigner matrices.