In this paper, we prove a necessary and sufficient condition for Tracy-Widom law of Wigner matrices. Consider $N \times N$ symmetric Wigner matrices $H$ with $H_{ij} = N^{-1/2} x_{ij}$, whose upper right entries $x_{ij}$ $(1\le i< j\le N)$ are $i.i.d.$ random variables with distribution $\mu$ and diagonal entries $x_{ii}$ $(1\le i\le N)$ are $i.i.d.$ random variables with distribution $\wt \mu$. The means of $\mu$ and $\wt \mu$ are zero, the variance of $\mu$ 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.

The universality for the eigenvalue spacing statistics of generalized Wigner matrices was established in our previous work \cite{EYY} under certain conditions on the probability distributions of the matrix elements. A major class of probability measures excluded in \cite{EYY} are the Bernoulli measures. In this paper, we extend the universality result of \cite{EYY} to include the Bernoulli measures so that the only restrictions on the probability distributions of the matrix elements are the subexponential decay and the normalization condition that the variances in each row sum up to one. The new ingredient is a strong local semicircle law which improves the error estimate on the Stieltjes transform of the empirical measure of the eigenvalues from the order $(N \eta)^{-1/2}$ to $(N \eta)^{-1}$. Here $\eta$ is the imaginary part of the spectral parameter in the definition of the Stieltjes transform and $N$ is the size of the matrix.

We prove the universality for the eigenvalue gap statistics in the bulk of the spectrum for band matrices, in the regime where the band width is comparable with the dimension of the matrix, $W \sim N$. All previous results concerning universality of non-Gaussian random matrices are for mean-field models. By relying on a new mean-field reduction technique, we deduce universality from quantum unique ergodicity for band matrices.