An optimal Poincar\'e inequality for the complex Ginibre log-gas

Abstract

We establish an optimal Poincar\'e inequality for real-valued symmetric observables of the complex Ginibre log-gas. Equality is attained by the real and imaginary parts of the center-of-mass observable. Equivalently, we determine the exact spectral gap of the associated overdamped Langevin dynamics, for real symmetric observables. The Hessian of the energy of this log-gas is unbounded below, so standard convexity arguments do not directly apply. The proof instead combines a Vandermonde transform, a holomorphic projection, and a complex Gaussian d-bar spectral-gap estimate, corresponding to the constant-curvature case of the H\"ormander-Berndtsson estimate. It is short and self-contained. It remains valid, beyond the quadratic potential, for rotationally invariant additive plurisubharmonic potential perturbations. Additionally, we provide four alternative proofs, two of which yield sum-of-squares formulas for the deficit, based respectively on a Hermite expansion and on an integrated Bochner-Kodaira formula, the other two use the spectral analysis of a two-sided number-operator factorization and a Hermite-Slater polynomial expansion. We furthermore present new results related to linear statistics, Gaussian factorization, polynomial eigenfunctions, log-Sobolev inequalities, matrix lift and eigenvector overlaps, and non-quadratic potentials.