A Universality Law For Sign Correlations of Eigenfunctions of Differential Operators

Abstract

We establish a universality law for sequences of functions $\{w_n\}_{n \in \mathbb{N}}$ satisfying a form of WKB approximation on compact intervals. This includes eigenfunctions of generic Schrödinger operators, as well as Laguerre and Chebyshev polynomials. Given two distinct points $x, y \in \mathbb{R}$, we ask how often do $w_n(x)$ and $w_n(y)$ have the same sign. Asymptotically, one would expect this to be true half the time, but this turns out to not always be the case. Under certain natural assumptions, we prove that, for all $x \neq y$, $$ \frac{1}{3} \leq \lim_{N \to \infty} \frac{1}{N} \# \left\{0 \leq n < N: \mathrm{sgn}(w_n(x)) = \mathrm{sgn}(w_n(y)) \right\} \leq \frac{2}{3}, $$ and that these bounds are optimal, and can be attained. Our methods extend to other questions of similar flavor and we also discuss a number of open problems.