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].

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.

In 1979, G. Parisi predicted a variational formula for the thermodynamic limit of the free energy in the Sherrington-Kirkpatrick model and described the role played by its minimizer. This formula was verified in the seminal work of Talagrand and later generalized to the mixed p-spin models by Panchenko. In this paper, we prove that the minimizer in Parisi's formula is unique at any temperature and external field by establishing the strict convexity of the Parisi functional.

We prove that uniform random quadrangulations of the sphere with$n$faces, endowed with the usual graph distance and renormalized by$n$^{−1/4}, converge as$n$→$∞$in distribution for the Gromov–Hausdorff topology to a limiting metric space. We validate a conjecture by Le Gall, by showing that the limit is (up to a scale constant) the so-called$Brownian map$, which was introduced by Marckert–Mokkadem and Le Gall as the most natural candidate for the scaling limit of many models of random plane maps. The proof relies strongly on the concept of$geodesic stars$in the map, which are configurations made of several geodesics that only share a common endpoint and do not meet elsewhere.

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