Harmonic analysis on the infinite-dimensional unitary group and determinantal point processes

Alexei Borodin, Grigori Olshanski

Published 2001-09-24, updated 2002-01-28Version 2

The infinite-dimensional unitary group U(infinity) is the inductive limit of growing compact unitary groups U(N). In this paper we solve a problem of harmonic analysis on U(infinity) stated in the previous paper math/0109193. The problem consists in computing spectral decomposition for a remarkable 4-parameter family of characters of U(infinity). These characters generate representations which should be viewed as analogs of nonexisting regular representation of U(infinity). The spectral decomposition of a character of U(infinity) is described by the spectral measure which lives on an infinite-dimensional space Omega of indecomposable characters. The key idea which allows us to solve the problem is to embed Omega into the space of point configurations on the real line without 2 points. This turns the spectral measure into a stochastic point process on the real line. The main result of the paper is a complete description of the processes corresponding to our concrete family of characters. We prove that each of the processes is a determinantal point process. That is, its correlation functions have determinantal form with a certain kernel. Our kernels have a special `integrable' form and are expressed through the Gauss hypergeometric function. In simpler situations of harmonic analysis on infinite symmetric group and harmonic analysis of unitarily invariant measures on infinite hermitian matrices similar results were obtained in our papers math/9810015, math/9904010, math-ph/0010015.