Excursion Fluctuations and Spectral Universality in Gaussian Fields

Abstract

We study the large-scale spatial fluctuations of excursion volumes for a class of smooth stationary Gaussian fields. In the case of Berry's random wave model in dimension $d\ge 2$, we show that the spatial fluctuations for fixed $u>0$ converge to the fractional Gaussian field $(-\hat{I}”{)}^{-1/4}W$ in the space of tempered distributions ${\mathcal{S}}^{\prime }({\mathbb{R}}^d)$, where $W$ is the $d$-dimensional Gaussian white noise. This explains the long-range correlations in the apparent filament structure of the Random Plane Wave model. For a class of smooth planar Gaussian fields whose spectral density has a power-law singularity at the origin, we prove convergence to fractional Gaussian fields with an index determined by the singularity exponent. More generally, the results illustrate that, for stationary random measures, large-scale spatial fluctuations are determined by the behaviour of the spectral measure density exponent near zero.

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