Some Recent Developments on the Geometry of Random Spherical Eigenfunctions

Abstract

A lot of efforts have been devoted in the last decade to the investigation of the high-frequency behaviour of geometric functionals for the excursion sets of random spherical harmonics, i.e., Gaussian eigenfunctions for the spherical Laplacian ${\Delta }_{{\mathbf{S}}^2}$. In this survey we shall review some of these results, with particular reference to the asymptotic behaviour of variances, phase transitions in the nodal case (the \emph{Berry's Cancellation Phenomenon}), the distribution of the fluctuations around the expected values, and the asymptotic correlation among different functionals. We shall also discuss some connections with the Gaussian Kinematic Formula, with Wiener-Chaos expansions and with recent developments in the derivation of Quantitative Central Limit Theorems (the so-called Stein-Malliavin approach).

arXiv commentAn invited survey prepared for the 8th European Congress of Mathematics