Commutative law for products of infinitely large isotropic random matrices

TL;DR

This paper proves that for large isotropic random matrices, the eigenvalue distribution of their products is independent of multiplication order and matches powers of individual matrices, revealing spectral properties and singular behaviors.

Contribution

It establishes spectral commutativity and self-averaging for products of large isotropic matrices, a novel insight into their eigenvalue distributions and singular behaviors.

Findings

Eigenvalue density of matrix products is order-independent.

Product eigenvalue density equals that of corresponding matrix powers.

Power law singularities at zero are characterized and related.

Abstract

Ensembles of isotropic random matrices are defined by the invariance of the probability measure under the left (and right) multiplication by an arbitrary unitary matrix. We show that the multiplication of large isotropic random matrices is spectrally commutative and self-averaging in the limit of infinite matrix size $N \rightarrow \infty$. The notion of spectral commutativity means that the eigenvalue density of a product ABC... of such matrices is independent of the order of matrix multiplication, for example the matrix ABCD has the same eigenvalue density as ADCB. In turn, the notion of self-averaging means that the product of n independent but identically distributed random matrices, which we symbolically denote by AAA..., has the same eigenvalue density as the corresponding power A^n of a single matrix drawn from the underlying matrix ensemble. For example, the eigenvalue density of ABCCABC is the same as of A^2B^2C^3. We also discuss the singular behavior of the eigenvalue and singular value densities of isotropic matrices and their products for small eigenvalues $\lambda \rightarrow 0$. We show that the singularities at the origin of the eigenvalue density and of the singular value density are in one-to-one correspondence in the limit $N \rightarrow \infty$: the eigenvalue density of an isotropic random matrix has a power law singularity at the origin $\sim |\lambda|^{-s}$ with a power $s \in (0,2)$ when and only when the density of its singular values has a power law singularity $\sim \lambda^{-\sigma}$ with a power $\sigma = s/(4-s)$. These results are obtained analytically in the limit $N \rightarrow \infty$. We supplement these results with numerical simulations for large but finite N and discuss finite size effects for the most common ensembles of isotropic random matrices.