Distribution of Eigenvalues of Random Real Symmetric Block Matrices

Random Matrix Theory (RMT) has successfully modeled diverse systems, from energy levels of heavy nuclei to zeros of \(L\)-functions. Many statistics in one can be interpreted in terms of quantities of the other; for example, zeros of \(L\)-functions correspond to eigenvalues of matrices, and values of \(L\)-functions to values of the characteristic polynomials. This correspondence has allowed RMT to successfully predict many number theory behaviors; however, there are some operations which to date have no RMT analogue. The motivation of this paper is to try and find an RMT equivalent to Rankin-Selberg convolution, which builds a new \(L\)-functions from an input pair. For definiteness we concentrate on two specific families, the ensemble of palindromic real symmetric Toeplitz (PST) matrices and the ensemble of real symmetric (RS) matrices, whose limiting spectral measures are the Gaussian and semicircle distributions, respectively; these were chosen as they are the two extreme cases in terms of moment calculations. For a PST matrix \(A\) and a RS matrix \(B\), we construct an ensemble of random real symmetric block matrices whose first row is \(\lbrace A, B \rbrace\) and whose second row is \(\lbrace B, A \rbrace\). By Markov's Method of Moments, we show this ensemble converges weakly and almost surely to a new, universal distribution with a hybrid of Gaussian and semicircle behaviors. We extend this construction by considering an iterated concatenation of matrices from an arbitrary pair of random real symmetric sub-ensembles with different limiting spectral measures. We prove that finite iterations converge to new, universal distributions with hybrid behavior, and that infinite iterations converge to the limiting spectral measures of the component matrices.