We construct a conformally invariant random family of closed curves in the plane by welding of random homeomorphisms of the unit circle. The homeomorphism is constructed using the exponential of$βX$, where X is the restriction of the 2-dimensional free field on the circle and the parameter$β$is in the “high temperature” regime $$ \beta < \sqrt {2} $$ . The welding problem is solved by studying a non-uniformly elliptic Beltrami equation with a random complex dilatation. For the existence a method of Lehto is used. This requires sharp probabilistic estimates to control conformal moduli of annuli and they are proven by decomposing the free field as a sum of independent fixed scale fields and controlling the correlations of the complex dilatation restricted to dyadic cells of various scales. For the uniqueness we invoke a result by Jones and Smirnov on conformal removability of Hölder curves. Our curves are closely related to SLE($ϰ$) for$ϰ$<4.

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.

The {\it{eigenvector empirical spectral distribution}} (VESD) is a useful tool in studying the limiting behavior of eigenvalues and eigenvectors of covariance matrices. In this paper, we study the convergence rate of the VESD of sample covariance matrices to the deformed Mar{\v c}enko-Pastur (MP) distribution. Consider sample covariance matrices of the form $\Sigma^{1/2} X X^* \Sigma^{1/2}$, where $X=(x_{ij})$ is an $M\times N$ random matrix whose entries are independent random variables with mean zero and variance $N^{-1}$, and $\Sigma$ is a deterministic positive-definite matrix. We prove that the Kolmogorov distance between the {\it{expected VESD}} and the deformed MP distribution is bounded by $N^{-1+\epsilon}$ for any fixed $\epsilon>0$, provided that the entries $\sqrt{N}x_{ij}$ have uniformly bounded 6th moments and $|N/M-1|\ge \tau$ for some constant $\tau>0$. This result improves the previous one obtained in [44], which gave the convergence rate $O(N^{-1/2})$ assuming $i.i.d.$ $X$ entries, bounded 10th moment, $\Sigma=I$ and $M<N$. Moreover, we also prove that under the finite $8$th moment assumption, the convergence rate of the VESD is $O(N^{-1/2+\epsilon})$ almost surely for any fixed $\epsilon>0$, which improves the previous bound $N^{-1/4+\epsilon}$ in [44].