Brownian motion and stochastic areas on complex full flag manifolds

Abstract

We show that the Brownian motion on the complex full flag manifold can be represented by a matrix-valued diffusion obtained from the unitary Brownian motion. This representation actually leads to an explicit formula for the characteristic function of the joint distribution of the stochastic areas on the full flag manifold. The limit law for those stochastic areas is shown to be a multivariate Cauchy distribution with independent and identically distributed entries. Using a deep connection between area functionals on the flag manifold and winding functionals on complex spheres, we establish new results about simultaneous Brownian windings on the complex sphere and their asymptotics. As a byproduct, our work also unveils a new probabilistic interpretation of the Jacobi operators and polynomials on simplices.