Eigenphase distributions of unimodular circular ensembles

Abstract

Motivated by the study of Polyakov lines in gauge theories, Hanada and Watanabe recently presented a conjectured formula for the distribution of eigenphases of Haar-distributed random SU(N) matrices ($β$=2), supported by explicit examples at small N and by numerical samplings at larger N. In this note, I spell out a concise proof of their formula, and present its orthogonal and symplectic counterparts, i.e. the eigenphase distributions of Haar-random unimodular symmetric ($β$=1) and selfdual ($β$=4) unitary matrices parametrizing SU(N)/SO(N) and SU(2N)/Sp(2N), respectively.