Local Universality for Zeros and Critical Points of Monochromatic Random Waves

Abstract

This paper concerns the asymptotic behavior of zeros and critical points for monochromatic random waves $$\phi _\lambda $$ of frequency $$\lambda $$ on a compact, smooth, Riemannian manifold (M, g) as $$\lambda \rightarrow \infty .$$ We prove global variance estimates for the measures of integration over the zeros and critical points of $$\phi _\lambda .$$ These global estimates hold for a wide class of manifolds—for example when (M, g) has no conjugate points—and rely on new local variance estimates on zeros and critical points of $$\phi _\lambda $$ in balls of radius $$\approx \lambda ^{-1}$$ around a fixed point. Our local results hold under conditions about the structure of geodesics that are generic in the space of all metrics on M.