Riesz Energy, $L^2$ Discrepancy, and Optimal Transport of Determinantal Point Processes on the Sphere and the Flat Torus

Bence Borda, Peter Grabner, Ryan W. Matzke

Published 2023-08-11Version 1

Determinantal point processes exhibit an inherent repulsive behavior, thus providing examples of very evenly distributed point sets on manifolds. In this paper, we study the so-called harmonic ensemble, defined in terms of Laplace eigenfunctions on the sphere $\mathbb{S}^d$ and the flat torus $\mathbb{T}^d$, and the so-called spherical ensemble on $\mathbb{S}^2$, which originates in random matrix theory. We extend results of Beltr\'an, Marzo and Ortega-Cerd\`a on the Riesz $s$-energy of the harmonic ensemble to the nonsingular regime $s<0$, and as a corollary find the expected value of the spherical cap $L^2$ discrepancy via the Stolarsky invariance principle. We also show that the spherical ensemble and the harmonic ensemble on $\mathbb{S}^2$ and $\mathbb{T}^2$ with $N$ points attain the optimal rate $N^{-1/2}$ in expectation in the Wasserstein metric $W_2$, in contrast to i.i.d. random points, which are known to lose a factor of $(\log N)^{1/2}$.