Mean conservation of nodal volume and connectivity measures for Gaussian ensembles

Abstract

We study in depth the nesting graph and volume distribution of the nodal domains of a Gaussian field, which have been shown in previous works to exhibit asymptotic laws. A striking link is established between the asymptotic mean connectivity of a nodal domain (i.e.\ the vertex degree in its nesting graph) and the positivity of the percolation probability of the field, along with a direct dependence of the average nodal volume on the percolation probability. Our results support the prevailing ansatz that the mean connectivity and volume of a nodal domain is conserved for generic random fields in dimension $d=2$ but not in $d \ge 3$, and are applied to a number of concrete motivating examples.