Heat flow and zeroes of polynomials II: zeroes on a circle

This is a sequel to this previous blog post, in which we discussed the effect of the heat flow evolution

on the zeroes of a time-dependent family of polynomials , with a particular focus on the case when the polynomials had real zeroes. Here (inspired by some discussions I had during a recent conference on the Riemann hypothesis in Bristol) we record the analogous theory in which the polynomials instead have zeroes on a circle , with the heat flow slightly adjusted to compensate for this. As we shall discuss shortly, a key example of this situation arises when is the numerator of the zeta function of a curve.

More precisely, let be a natural number. We will say that a polynomial

of degree (so that ) obeys the functional equation if the are all real and

for all , thus

and

for all non-zero . This means that the zeroes of (counting multiplicity) lie in and are symmetric with respect to complex conjugation and inversion across the circle . We say that this polynomial obeys the Riemann hypothesis if all of its zeroes actually lie on the circle . For instance, in the case, the polynomial obeys the Riemann hypothesis if and only if .

Such polynomials arise in number theory as follows: if is a projective curve of genus over a finite field , then, as famously proven by Weil, the associated local zeta function (as defined for instance in this previous blog post) is known to take the form

where is a degree polynomial obeying both the functional equation and the Riemann hypothesis. In the case that is an elliptic curve, then and takes the form , where is the number of -points of minus . The Riemann hypothesis in this case is a famous result of Hasse.

Another key example of such polynomials arise from rescaled characteristic polynomials

of matrices in the compact symplectic group . These polynomials obey both the functional equation and the Riemann hypothesis. The Sato-Tate conjecture (in higher genus) asserts, roughly speaking, that “typical” polyomials arising from the number theoretic situation above are distributed like the rescaled characteristic polynomials (1), where is drawn uniformly from with Haar measure.

Given a polynomial of degree with coefficients

we can evolve it in time by the formula

thus for . Informally, as one increases , this evolution accentuates the effect of the extreme monomials, particularly, and at the expense of the intermediate monomials such as , and conversely as one decreases . This family of polynomials obeys the heat-type equation

In view of the results of Marcus, Spielman, and Srivastava, it is also very likely that one can interpret this flow in terms of expected characteristic polynomials involving conjugation over the compact symplectic group , and should also be tied to some sort of “” version of Brownian motion on this group, but we have not attempted to work this connection out in detail.

It is clear that if obeys the functional equation, then so does for any other time . Now we investigate the evolution of the zeroes. Suppose at some time that the zeroes of are distinct, then

From the inverse function theorem we see that for times sufficiently close to , the zeroes of continue to be distinct (and vary smoothly in ), with

Differentiating this at any not equal to any of the , we obtain

and

and

Inserting these formulae into (2) (expanding as ) and canceling some terms, we conclude that

for sufficiently close to , and not equal to . Extracting the residue at , we conclude that

which we can rearrange as

If we make the change of variables (noting that one can make depend smoothly on for sufficiently close to ), this becomes

Intuitively, this equation asserts that the phases repel each other if they are real (and attract each other if their difference is imaginary). If obeys the Riemann hypothesis, then the are all real at time , then the Picard uniqueness theorem (applied to and its complex conjugate) then shows that the are also real for sufficiently close to . If we then define the entropy functional

then the above equation becomes a gradient flow

which implies in particular that is non-increasing in time. This shows that as one evolves time forward from , there is a uniform lower bound on the separation between the phases , and hence the equation can be solved indefinitely; in particular, obeys the Riemann hypothesis for all if it does so at time . Our argument here assumed that the zeroes of were simple, but this assumption can be removed by the usual limiting argument.

For any polynomial obeying the functional equation, the rescaled polynomials converge locally uniformly to as . By Rouche’s theorem, we conclude that the zeroes of converge to the equally spaced points on the circle . Together with the symmetry properties of the zeroes, this implies in particular that obeys the Riemann hypothesis for all sufficiently large positive . In the opposite direction, when , the polynomials converge locally uniformly to , so if , of the zeroes converge to the origin and the other converge to infinity. In particular, fails the Riemann hypothesis for sufficiently large negative . Thus (if ), there must exist a real number , which we call the de Bruijn-Newman constant of the original polynomial , such that obeys the Riemann hypothesis for and fails the Riemann hypothesis for . The situation is a bit more complicated if vanishes; if is the first natural number such that (or equivalently, ) does not vanish, then by the above arguments one finds in the limit that of the zeroes go to the origin, go to infinity, and the remaining zeroes converge to the equally spaced points . In this case the de Bruijn-Newman constant remains finite except in the degenerate case , in which case .

For instance, consider the case when and for some real with . Then the quadratic polynomial

has zeroes

and one easily checks that these zeroes lie on the circle when , and are on the real axis otherwise. Thus in this case we have (with if ). Note how as increases to , the zeroes repel each other and eventually converge to , while as decreases to , the zeroes collide and then separate on the real axis, with one zero going to the origin and the other to infinity.

The arguments in my paper with Brad Rodgers (discussed in this previous post) indicate that for a “typical” polynomial of degree that obeys the Riemann hypothesis, the expected time to relaxation to equilibrium (in which the zeroes are equally spaced) should be comparable to , basically because the average spacing is and hence by (3) the typical velocity of the zeroes should be comparable to , and the diameter of the unit circle is comparable to , thus requiring time comparable to to reach equilibrium. Taking contrapositives, this suggests that the de Bruijn-Newman constant should typically take on values comparable to (since typically one would not expect the initial configuration of zeroes to be close to evenly spaced). I have not attempted to formalise or prove this claim, but presumably one could do some numerics (perhaps using some of the examples of given previously) to explore this further.

Heat flow and zeroes of polynomials

Let be a monic polynomial of degree with complex coefficients. Then by the fundamental theorem of algebra, we can factor as

for some complex zeroes (possibly with repetition).

Now suppose we evolve with respect to time by heat flow, creating a function of two variables with given initial data for which

On the space of polynomials of degree at most , the operator is nilpotent, and one can solve this equation explicitly both forwards and backwards in time by the Taylor series

For instance, if one starts with a quadratic , then the polynomial evolves by the formula

As the polynomial evolves in time, the zeroes evolve also. Assuming for sake of discussion that the zeroes are simple, the inverse function theorem tells us that the zeroes will (locally, at least) evolve smoothly in time. What are the dynamics of this evolution?

For instance, in the quadratic case, the quadratic formula tells us that the zeroes are

and

after arbitrarily choosing a branch of the square root. If are real and the discriminant is initially positive, we see that we start with two real zeroes centred around , which then approach each other until time , at which point the roots collide and then move off from each other in an imaginary direction.

In the general case, we can obtain the equations of motion by implicitly differentiating the defining equation

in time using (2) to obtain

To simplify notation we drop the explicit dependence on time, thus

From (1) and the product rule, we see that

and

(where all indices are understood to range over ) leading to the equations of motion

at least when one avoids those times in which there is a repeated zero. In the case when the zeroes are real, each term represents a (first-order) attraction in the dynamics between and , but the dynamics are more complicated for complex zeroes (e.g. purely imaginary zeroes will experience repulsion rather than attraction, as one already sees in the quadratic example). Curiously, this system resembles that of Dyson brownian motion (except with the brownian motion part removed, and time reversed). I learned of the connection between the ODE (3) and the heat equation from this paper of Csordas, Smith, and Varga, but perhaps it has been mentioned in earlier literature as well.

One interesting consequence of these equations is that if the zeroes are real at some time, then they will stay real as long as the zeroes do not collide. Let us now restrict attention to the case of real simple zeroes, in which case we will rename the zeroes as instead of , and order them as . The evolution

can now be thought of as reverse gradient flow for the “entropy”

(which is also essentially the logarithm of the discriminant of the polynomial) since we have

In particular, we have the monotonicity formula

where is the “energy”

where in the last line we use the antisymmetrisation identity

Among other things, this shows that as one goes backwards in time, the entropy decreases, and so no collisions can occur to the past, only in the future, which is of course consistent with the attractive nature of the dynamics. As is a convex function of the positions , one expects to also evolve in a convex manner in time, that is to say the energy should be increasing. This is indeed the case:

Exercise 1 Show that

Symmetric polynomials of the zeroes are polynomial functions of the coefficients and should thus evolve in a polynomial fashion. One can compute this explicitly in simple cases. For instance, the center of mass is an invariant:

The variance decreases linearly:

Exercise 2 Establish the virial identity

As the variance (which is proportional to ) cannot become negative, this identity shows that “finite time blowup” must occur – that the zeroes must collide at or before the time .

Exercise 3 Show that the Stieltjes transform

solves the viscous Burgers equation

either by using the original heat equation (2) and the identity , or else by using the equations of motion (3). This relation between the Burgers equation and the heat equation is known as the Cole-Hopf transformation.

The paper of Csordas, Smith, and Varga mentioned previously gives some other bounds on the lifespan of the dynamics; roughly speaking, they show that if there is one pair of zeroes that are much closer to each other than to the other zeroes then they must collide in a short amount of time (unless there is a collision occuring even earlier at some other location). Their argument extends also to situations where there are an infinite number of zeroes, which they apply to get new results on Newman’s conjecture in analytic number theory. I would be curious to know of further places in the literature where this dynamics has been studied.

Random matrices: The Universality phenomenon for Wigner ensembles

Van Vu and I have just uploaded to the arXiv our paper “Random matrices: The Universality phenomenon for Wigner ensembles“. This survey is a longer version (58 pages) of a previous short survey we wrote up a few months ago. The survey focuses on recent progress in understanding the universality phenomenon for Hermitian Wigner ensembles, of which the Gaussian Unitary Ensemble (GUE) is the most well known. The one-sentence summary of this progress is that many of the asymptotic spectral statistics (e.g. correlation functions, eigenvalue gaps, determinants, etc.) that were previously known for GUE matrices, are now known for very large classes of Wigner ensembles as well. There are however a wide variety of results of this type, due to the large number of interesting spectral statistics, the varying hypotheses placed on the ensemble, and the different modes of convergence studied, and it is difficult to isolate a single such result currently as the definitive universality result. (In particular, there is at present a tradeoff between generality of ensemble and strength of convergence; the universality results that are available for the most general classes of ensemble are only presently able to demonstrate a rather weak sense of convergence to the universal distribution (involving an additional averaging in the energy parameter), which limits the applicability of such results to a number of interesting questions in which energy averaging is not permissible, such as the study of the least singular value of a Wigner matrix, or of related quantities such as the condition number or determinant. But it is conceivable that this tradeoff is a temporary phenomenon and may be eliminated by future work in this area; in the case of Hermitian matrices whose entries have the same second moments as that of the GUE ensemble, for instance, the need for energy averaging has already been removed.)

Nevertheless, throughout the family of results that have been obtained recently, there are two main methods which have been fundamental to almost all of the recent progress in extending from special ensembles such as GUE to general ensembles. The first method, developed extensively by Erdos, Schlein, Yau, Yin, and others (and building on an initial breakthrough by Johansson), is the heat flow method, which exploits the rapid convergence to equilibrium of the spectral statistics of matrices undergoing Dyson-type flows towards GUE. (An important aspect to this method is the ability to accelerate the convergence to equilibrium by localising the Hamiltonian, in order to eliminate the slowest modes of the flow; this refinement of the method is known as the “local relaxation flow” method. Unfortunately, the translation mode is not accelerated by this process, which is the principal reason why results obtained by pure heat flow methods still require an energy averaging in the final conclusion; it would of interest to find a way around this difficulty.) The other method, which goes all the way back to Lindeberg in his classical proof of the central limit theorem, and which was introduced to random matrix theory by Chatterjee and then developed for the universality problem by Van Vu and myself, is the swapping method, which is based on the observation that spectral statistics of Wigner matrices tend to be stable if one replaces just one or two entries of the matrix with another distribution, with the stability of the swapping process becoming stronger if one assumes that the old and new entries have many matching moments. The main formalisations of this observation are known as four moment theorems, because they require four matching moments between the entries, although there are some variant three moment theorems and two moment theorems in the literature as well. Our initial four moment theorems were focused on individual eigenvalues (and later also to eigenvectors), but it was later observed by Erdos, Yau, and Yin that simpler four moment theorems could also be established for aggregate spectral statistics, such as the coefficients of the Greens function, and Knowles and Yin also subsequently observed that these latter theorems could be used to recover a four moment theorem for eigenvalues and eigenvectors, giving an alternate approach to proving such theorems.

Interestingly, it seems that the heat flow and swapping methods are complementary to each other; the heat flow methods are good at removing moment hypotheses on the coefficients, while the swapping methods are good at removing regularity hypotheses. To handle general ensembles with minimal moment or regularity hypotheses, it is thus necessary to combine the two methods (though perhaps in the future a third method, or a unification of the two existing methods, might emerge).

Besides the heat flow and swapping methods, there are also a number of other basic tools that are also needed in these results, such as local semicircle laws and eigenvalue rigidity, which are also discussed in the survey. We also survey how universality has been established for wide variety of spectral statistics; the -point correlation functions are the most well known of these statistics, but they do not tell the whole story (particularly if one can only control these functions after an averaging in the energy), and there are a number of other statistics, such as eigenvalue counting functions, determinants, or spectral gaps, for which the above methods can be applied.

In order to prevent the survey from becoming too enormous, we decided to restrict attention to Hermitian matrix ensembles, whose entries off the diagonal are identically distributed, as this is the case in which the strongest results are available. There are several results that are applicable to more general ensembles than these which are briefly mentioned in the survey, but they are not covered in detail.

We plan to submit this survey eventually to the proceedings of a workshop on random matrix theory, and will continue to update the references on the arXiv version until the time comes to actually submit the paper.

Finally, in the survey we issue some errata for previous papers of Van and myself in this area, mostly centering around the three moment theorem (a variant of the more widely used four moment theorem), for which the original proof of Van and myself was incomplete. (Fortunately, as the three moment theorem had many fewer applications than the four moment theorem, and most of the applications that it did have ended up being superseded by subsequent papers, the actual impact of this issue was limited, but still an erratum is in order.)

Recent progress on the Kakeya conjecture

Below the fold is a version of my talk “Recent progress on the Kakeya conjecture” that I gave at the Fefferman conference.