Gaussian fluctuations for linear eigenvalue statistics of products of independent iid random matrices

Abstract: Consider the product $X = X_{1}\cdots X_{m}$ of $m$ independent $n\times n$ iid random matrices. When $m$ is fixed and the dimension $n$ tends to infinity, we prove Gaussian limits for the centered linear spectral statistics of $X$ for analytic test functions. We show that the limiting variance is universal in the sense that it does not depend on $m$ (the number of factor matrices) or on the distribution of the entries of the matrices. The main result generalizes and improves upon previous limit statements for the linear spectral statistics of a single iid matrix by Rider and Silverstein as well as Renfrew and the second author.