Fluctuations of Level Curves for Time-Dependent Spherical Random Fields

The investigation of the behaviour for geometric functionals of random fields on manifolds has drawn recently considerable attention. In this paper, we extend this framework by considering fluctuations over time for the level curves of general isotropic Gaussian spherical random fields. We focus on both long and short memory assumptions; in the former case, we show that the fluctuations of <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mi>u</mml:mi> </mml:math> -level curves are dominated by a single component, corresponding to a second-order chaos evaluated on a subset of the multipole components for the random field. We prove the existence of cancellation points where the variance is asymptotically of smaller order; these points do not include the nodal case <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mrow> <mml:mi>u</mml:mi> <mml:mo>=</mml:mo> <mml:mn>0</mml:mn> </mml:mrow> </mml:math> , in marked contrast with recent results on the high-frequency behaviour of nodal lines for random eigenfunctions with no temporal dependence. In the short memory case, we show that all chaoses contribute in the limit, no cancellation occurs and a Central Limit Theorem can be established by Fourth-Moment Theorems and a Breuer–Major argument.