We study the general problem of equidistribution of expanding translates of an analytic curve by an algebraic diagonal flow on the homogeneous space of a semisimple algebraic group G. We define two families of algebraic subvarieties of the associated partial flag variety, which give the obstructions to non-divergence and equidistribution. We apply this to prove that for Lebesgue almost every point on an analytic curve in the space of m × n real matrices whose image is not contained in any subvariety coming from these two families, Dirichlet’s theorem on simultaneous Diophantine approximation cannot be improved. The proof combines geometric invariant theory, Ratner’s theorem on measure rigidity for unipotent flows, and linearization technique.

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 $M^{-1}$.

Period mappings were introduced in the sixties [G] to study variation of complex structures of families of algebraic varieties. The theory of tautological systems was introduced recently [LSY,LY] to understand period integrals of algebraic manifolds. In this paper, we give an explicit construction of a tautological system for each component of a period mapping.

No abstract uploaded!

No abstract uploaded!