2008/11/14 by Satya N. Majumdar, Massimo Vergassola
Physics and Astronomy · #cond-mat.stat-mech #cond-mat.dis-nn
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physrevlett.102.060601
published as Phys.Rev.Lett.102:060601,2009 · 4 pages, 3 .eps figures included
arxiv created 2008/11/14 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
We present a simple Coulomb gas method to calculate analytically the probability of rare events where the maximum eigenvalue of a random matrix is much larger than its typical value. The large deviation function that characterizes this probability is computed explicitly for Wishart and Gaussian ensembles. The method is quite general and applies to other related problems, e.g. the joint large deviation function for large fluctuations of top eigenvalues. Our results are relevant to widely employed data compression techniques, namely the principal components analysis. Analytical predictions are verified by extensive numerical simulations.