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 $pN\gg N^{2/3}$.

In this paper, we consider the universality of the local eigenvalue statistics of random matrices. Our main result shows that these statistics are determined by the first four moments of the distribution of the entries. As a consequence, we derive the universality of eigenvalue gap distribution and$k$-point correlation, and many other statistics (under some mild assumptions) for both Wigner Hermitian matrices and Wigner real symmetric matrices.

We prove an estimate on the smallest singular value of a multiplicatively and additively deformed random rectangular matrix. Suppose $n\le N \le M \le dN$ for some constant $d\ge 1$. Let $X$ be an $M\times n$ random matrix with independent and identically distributed entries, which have zero mean, unit variance and arbitrarily high moments. Let $T$ be an $N\times M$ deterministic matrix with comparable singular values $c\le s_{N}(T) \le s_{1}(T) \le c^{-1}$ for some constant $c>0$. Let $A$ be an $N\times n$ deterministic matrix with $\|A\|=O(\sqrt{N})$. Then we prove that for any $\epsilon>0$, the smallest singular value of $TX-A$ is larger than $N^{-\epsilon}(\sqrt{N}-\sqrt{n-1})$ with high probability. If we assume further the entries of $X$ have subgaussian decay, then the smallest singular value of $TX-A$ is at least of the order $\sqrt{N}-\sqrt{n-1}$ with high probability, which is an essentially optimal estimate.