The spherical ensemble and quasi-Monte-Carlo designs

Journal article, 2023

The spherical ensemble is a well-known ensemble of N repulsive points on the two-dimensional sphere, which can realized in various ways (as a random matrix ensemble, a determinantal point process, a Coulomb gas, a Quantum Hall state..). Here we show that the spherical ensemble enjoys remarkable convergence properties from the point of view of numerical integration. More precisely, it is shown that the numerical integration rule corresponding to N nodes on the two-dimensional sphere sampled in the spherical ensemble is, with overwhelming probability, nearly a quasi-Monte-Carlo design in the sense of Brauchart-Saff-Sloan-Womersley for any smoothness parameter s≤ 2. The key ingredient is a new explicit sub-Gaussian concentration of measure inequality for the spherical ensemble.