A large deviation principle for Wigner matrices without Gaussian tails

We consider $n\times n$ Hermitian matrices with i.i.d. entries $X_{ij}$ whose tail probabilities $\mathbb {P}(|X_{ij}|\geq t)$ behave like $e^{-at^α}$ for some $a>0$ and $α\in(0,2)$. We establish a large deviation principle for the empirical spectral measure of $X/\sqrt{n}$ with speed $n^{1+α/2}$ with a good rate function $J(μ)$ that is finite only if $μ$ is of the form $μ=μ_{\mathrm{sc}}\boxplusν$ for some probability measure $ν$ on $\mathbb {R}$, where $\boxplus$ denotes the free convolution and $μ_{\mathrm{sc}}$ is Wigner's semicircle law. We obtain explicit expressions for $J(μ_{\mathrm{sc}}\boxplusν)$ in terms of the $α$th moment of $ν$. The proof is based on the analysis of large deviations for the empirical distribution of very sparse random rooted networks.

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