Universality Conjecture for all Airy, Sine and Bessel Kernels in the Complex Plane

G. Akemann, M. J. Phillips

Published 2012-04-12Version 1

We address the question of how the celebrated universality of local correlations for the real eigenvalues of Hermitian random matrices of size NxN can be extended to complex eigenvalues in the case of random matrices without symmetry. Depending on the location in the spectrum, particular large-N limits (the so-called weakly non-Hermitian limits) lead to one-parameter deformations of the Airy, sine and Bessel kernels into the complex plane. This makes their universality highly suggestive for all symmetry classes. We compare all the known limiting real kernels and their deformations into the complex plane for all three Dyson indices beta=1,2,4, corresponding to real, complex and quaternion real matrix elements. This includes new results for Airy kernels in the complex plane for beta=1,4. For the Gaussian ensembles of elliptic Ginibre and non-Hermitian Wishart matrices we give all kernels for finite N, built from orthogonal and skew-orthogonal polynomials in the complex plane. Finally we comment on how much is known to date regarding the universality of these kernels in the complex plane, and discuss some open problems.