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Central limit theorem for the heat kernel measure on the unitary group

We prove that for a finite collection of real-valued functions $f_{1},...,f_{n}$ on the group of complex numbers of modulus 1 which are derivable with Lipschitz continuous derivative, the distribution of $(\tr f_{1},...,\tr f_{n})$ under the properly scaled heat kernel measure at a given time on the unitary group $\U(N)$ has Gaussian fluctuations as $N$ tends to infinity, with a covariance for which we give a formula and which is of order $N^{-1}$. In the limit where the time tends to infinity, we prove that this covariance converges to that obtained by P. Diaconis and S. Evans in a previous work on uniformly distributed unitary matrices. Finally, we discuss some combinatorial aspects of our results.