Freely Independent Coin Tosses, Standard Young Tableaux, and the Kesten--McKay Law

Abstract: In this article, we shall start with a closed walk on a regular tree of degree $d$. These walks are described by the Kesten-McKay law which arises as the asymptotic distribution of a random $d$-regular graph on $n$ vertices. We will show that the moments of the Kesten-McKay law are given by counting standard Young tableaux with at most 2 rows, and how some properties of the walk make sense even when $d$ is not an integer. We will use free probability to instruct us how to build an explicit model in random matrix theory.