Scaling Limits for Mixed Kernels

Let \(\mu \) and \(\nu \) be measures supported on \(\left( -1,1\right) \) with corresponding orthonormal polynomials \(\left\{ p_{n}^{\mu }\right\} \) and \( \left\{ p_{n}^{\nu }\right\} \), respectively. Define the mixed kernel

$$\begin{aligned} K_{n}^{{\mu },\nu }\left( x,y\right) =\sum _{j=0}^{n-1}p_{j}^{\mu }\left( x\right) p_{j}^{\nu }\left( y\right) . \end{aligned}$$

We establish scaling limits such as

$$\begin{aligned}&\lim _{n\rightarrow \infty }\frac{\pi \sqrt{1-\xi ^{2}}\sqrt{\mu ^{\prime }\left( \xi \right) \nu ^{\prime }\left( \xi \right) }}{n}K_{n}^{\mu ,\nu }\left( \xi +\frac{a\pi \sqrt{1-\xi ^{2}}}{n},\xi +\frac{b\pi \sqrt{1-\xi ^{2}}}{n}\right) \\&\quad =S\left( \frac{\pi \left( a-b\right) }{2}\right) \cos \left( \frac{\pi \left( a-b\right) }{2}+B\left( \xi \right) \right) , \end{aligned}$$

where \(S\left( t\right) =\frac{\sin t}{t}\) is the sinc kernel, and \(B\left( \xi \right) \) depends on \({\mu },\nu \) and \(\xi \). This reduces to the classical universality limit in the bulk when \(\mu =\nu \). We deduce applications to the zero distribution of \(K_{n}^{{\mu },\nu }\), and asymptotics for its derivatives.