Spectral measure of large random Hankel, Markov and Toeplitz matrices

Włodzimierz Bryc, Amir Dembo, Tiefeng Jiang

Published 2003-07-25, updated 2006-02-27Version 3

We study the limiting spectral measure of large symmetric random matrices of linear algebraic structure. For Hankel and Toeplitz matrices generated by i.i.d. random variables $\{X_k\}$ of unit variance, and for symmetric Markov matrices generated by i.i.d. random variables $\{X_{ij}\}_{j>i}$ of zero mean and unit variance, scaling the eigenvalues by $\sqrt{n}$ we prove the almost sure, weak convergence of the spectral measures to universal, nonrandom, symmetric distributions $\gamma_H$, $\gamma_M$ and $\gamma_T$ of unbounded support. The moments of $\gamma_H$ and $\gamma_T$ are the sum of volumes of solids related to Eulerian numbers, whereas $\gamma_M$ has a bounded smooth density given by the free convolution of the semicircle and normal densities. For symmetric Markov matrices generated by i.i.d. random variables $\{X_{ij}\}_{j>i}$ of mean $m$ and finite variance, scaling the eigenvalues by ${n}$ we prove the almost sure, weak convergence of the spectral measures to the atomic measure at $-m$. If $m=0$, and the fourth moment is finite, we prove that the spectral norm of $\mathbf {M}_n$ scaled by $\sqrt{2n\log n}$ converges almost surely to 1.