Fluctuation Moments for Regular Functions of Wigner Matrices

Abstract

We compute the deterministic approximation for mixed fluctuation moments of products of deterministic matrices and general Sobolev functions of Wigner matrices. Restricting to polynomials, our formulas reproduce recent results of Male et al. (Random Matrices Theory Appl. 11(2):2250015, 2022), showing that the underlying combinatorics of non-crossing partitions and annular non-crossing permutations continue to stay valid beyond the setting of second-order free probability theory. The formulas obtained further characterize the variance in the functional central limit theorem given in the recent companion paper (Reker in Preprint, arXiv:2204.03419, 2023). and thus allow identifying the fluctuation around the thermal value in certain thermalization problems.