Circular β ensembles, CMV representation, characteristic polynomials

Abstract

In this note we first briefly review some recent progress in the study of the circular β ensemble on the unit circle, where β > 0 is a model parameter. In the special cases β = 1,2 and 4, this ensemble describes the joint probability density of eigenvalues of random orthogonal, unitary and sympletic matrices, respectively. For general β, Killip and Nenciu discovered a five-diagonal sparse matrix model, the CMV representation. This representation is new even in the case β = 2; and it has become a powerful tool for studying the circular β ensemble. We then give an elegant derivation for the moment identities of characteristic polynomials via the link with orthogonal polynomials on the unit circle.