Spectral radius of random matrices with independent entries

Abstract: We consider random $n\times n$ matrices $X$ with independent and centered entries and a general variance profile. We show that the spectral radius of $X$ converges with very high probability to the square root of the spectral radius of the variance matrix of $X$ when $n$ tends to infinity. We also establish the optimal rate of convergence, that is a new result even for general i.i.d. matrices beyond the explicitly solvable Gaussian cases. The main ingredient is the proof of the local inhomogeneous circular law [arXiv:1612.07776] at the spectral edge.