CHAOS OF A MARKOV OPERATOR AND THE FOURTH MOMENT CONDITION

We analyze from the viewpoint of an abstract Markov operator recent results by Nualart and Peccati, and Nourdin and Peccati, on the fourth moment as a condition on a Wiener chaos to have a distribution close to Gaussian. In particular, we are led to introduce a notion of chaos associated to a Markov operator through its iterated gradients and present conditions on the (pure) point spectrum for a sequence of chaos eigenfunctions to converge to a Gaussian distribution. Convergence to gamma distributions may be examined similarly.