A direct approach to soft and hard edge universality for random normal matrices

Abstract: We develop a unified approach to universality of local scaling limits for eigenvalues of random normal matrices, or equivalently for planar Coulomb gases at inverse temperature $β=2$. The approach is direct in that it does not rely on expressing the kernels in terms of orthogonal polynomials. There are three main results. The first is a proof of universality at hard edges with no symmetry assumptions on either the potential or the hard edge. We also prove local universality at regular soft edges for droplets with several components, and lastly for soft/hard edges where a hard edge perfectly aligns with the droplet boundary. The main ingredients are Paley-Wiener type spectral embeddings for the Hilbert space associated with a limiting kernel, and the construction of weighted polynomials peaking near a given boundary point.