On the rate of convergence to the semi-circular law

Friedrich Götze, Alexander Tikhomirov

Published 2011-09-03, updated 2013-10-28Version 3

Let $\mathbf X=(X_{jk})$ denote a Hermitian random matrix with entries $X_{jk}$, which are independent for $1\le j\le k$. We consider the rate of convergence of the empirical spectral distribution function of the matrix $\mathbf X$ to the semi-circular law assuming that $\mathbf E X_{jk}=0$, $\mathbf E X_{jk}^2=1$ and that the distributions of the matrix elements $X_{jk}$ have a uniform sub exponential decay in the sense that there exists a constant $\varkappa>0$ such that for any $1\le j\le k\le n$ and any $t\ge 1$ we have $$ \Pr\{|X_{jk}|>t\}\le \varkappa^{-1}\exp\{-t^{\varkappa}\}. $$ By means of a recursion argument it is shown that the Kolmogorov distance between the empirical spectral distribution of the Wigner matrix $\mathbf W=\frac1{\sqrt n}\mathbf X$ and the semicircular law is of order $O(n^{-1}\log^b n)$ with some positive constant $b>0$.