Matricially free random variables

We show that the framework developed by Voiculescu for free random variables can be extended to arrays of random variables whose multiplication imitates matricial multiplication. The associated notion of independence, called matricial freeness, can be viewed as a concept which not only leads to a natural generalization of freeness, but also underlies other fundamental types of noncommutative independence, such as monotone independence and boolean independence. At the same time, the sums of matricially free random variables, called random pseudomatrices, are closely related to random matrices. The main results presented in this paper concern the standard and tracial central limit theorems for random pseudomatrices and the corresponding limit distributions which can be viewed as matricial semicircle laws. © 2010 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.