Mean of the $L^\infty$-norm for $L^2$-normalized random waves on compact aperiodic Riemannian manifolds

Abstract: This article concerns upper bounds for $L^\infty$-norms of random approximate eigenfunctions of the Laplace operator on a compact aperiodic Riemannian manifold $(M,g).$ We study $f_{\lambda}$ chosen uniformly at random from the space of $L^2$-normalized linear combinations of Laplace eigenfunctions with eigenvalues in the interval $(\lambda^2, \lr{\lambda+1}^2].$ Our main result is that the expected value of $\norm{f_\lambda}_\infty$ grows at most like $C \sqrt{\log \lambda}$ as $\lambda \to \infty$, where $C$ is an explicit constant depending only on the dimension and volume of $(M,g).$ In addition, we obtain concentration of the $L^\infty$-norm around its mean and median and study the analogous problems for Gaussian random waves on $(M,g).$