Universality of extremal eigenvalues of large random matrices

Giorgio Cipolloni, László Erdős, Yuanyuan Xu

Published 2023-12-13Version 1

We prove that the spectral radius of a large random matrix $X$ with independent, identically distributed complex entries follows the Gumbel law irrespective of the distribution of the matrix elements. This solves a long-standing conjecture of Bordenave and Chafa{\"\i} and it establishes the first universality result for one of the most prominent extremal spectral statistics in random matrix theory. Furthermore, we also prove that the argument of the largest eigenvalue is uniform on the unit circle and that the extremal eigenvalues of $X$ form a Poisson point process.