Euclidean distance between Haar orthogonal and gaussian matrices

Abstract: In this work we study a version of the general question of how well a Haar distributed orthogonal matrix can be approximated by a random gaussian matrix. Here, we consider a gaussian random matrix $Y_n$ of order $n$ and apply to it the Gram-Schmidt orthonormalization procedure by columns to obtain a Haar distributed orthogonal matrix $U_n$. If $F_i^m$ denotes the vector formed by the first $m$-coordinates of the $i$th row of $Y_n-\sqrt{n}U_n$ and $\alpha=\frac{m}{n}$, our main result shows that the euclidean norm of $F_i^m$ converges exponentially fast to $\sqrt{ \left(2-\frac{4}{3} \frac{(1-(1 -\alpha)^{3/2})}{\alpha}\right)m}$, up to negligible terms. To show the extent of this result, we use it to study the convergence of the supremum norm $\epsilon_n(m)=\sup_{1\leq i \leq n, 1\leq j \leq m} |y_{i,j}- \sqrt{n}u_{i,j}|$ and we find a coupling that improves by a factor $\sqrt{2}$ the recently proved best known upper bound of $\epsilon_n(m)$. Applications of our results to Quantum Information Theory are also explained.