Trace Formulae and Spectral Statistics for Discrete Laplacians on Regular Graphs (II)

Abstract

Following the derivation of the trace formulae in the first paper in this series, we establish here a connection between the spectral statistics of random regular graphs and the predictions of Random Matrix Theory (RMT). This follows from the known Poisson distribution of cycle counts in regular graphs, in the limit that the cycle periods are kept constant and the number of vertices increases indefinitely. The result is analogous to the so called "diagonal approximation" in Quantum Chaos. We also show that by assuming that the spectral correlations are given by RMT to all orders, we can compute the leading deviations from the Poisson distribution for cycle counts. We provide numerical evidence which supports this conjecture.