The Brown measure of a family of free multiplicative Brownian motions

Abstract

We consider a family of free multiplicative Brownian motions $b_{s,\tau}$ parametrized by a real variance parameter $s$ and a complex covariance parameter $\tau.$ We compute the Brown measure $\mu_{s,\tau}$ of $ub_{s,\tau },$ where $u$ is a unitary element freely independent of $b_{s,\tau}.$ We find that $\mu_{s,\tau}$ has a simple structure, with a density in logarithmic coordinates that is constant in the $\tau$-direction. These results generalize those of Driver-Hall-Kemp and Ho-Zhong for the case $\tau=s.$ We also establish a remarkable "model deformation phenomenon," stating that all the Brown measures with $s$ fixed and $\tau$ varying are related by push-forward under a natural family of maps. Our proofs use a first-order nonlinear PDE of Hamilton-Jacobi type satisfied by the regularized log potential of the Brown measures. Although this approach is inspired by the PDE method introduced by Driver-Hall-Kemp, our methods are substantially different at both the technical and conceptual level.