Semicircular law with a few independent entries in a random matrix

Abstract

It is well known in random matrix literature that the limiting spectral distribution of a Wigner matrix is the semi circular law while the limiting spectral distributions of other patterned matrices like Toeplitz, Hankel, symmetric circulant and reverse circulant matrices have unbounded supports. One fundamental difference between the Wigner matrices and the other matrices mentioned above is that the Wigner matrices have $O(n^2)$ independent random variables while the others have $O(n)$ independent random variables. In this paper, we show that this is not true in general. In particular, we form matrices with $O(n)$ independent random variables whose empirical spectral distributions are arbitrary close to the semi circular law.