Spectral Radii of Products of Random Rectangular Matrices

We consider m independent random rectangular matrices whose entries are independent and identically distributed standard complex Gaussian random variables. Assume the product of the m rectangular matrices is an n-by-n square matrix. The maximum absolute value of the n eigenvalues of the product matrix is called spectral radius. In this paper, we study the limiting spectral radii of the product when m changes with n and can even diverge. We give a complete description for the limiting distribution of the spectral radius. Our results reduce to those in Jiang and Qi (J Theor Probab 30(1):326–364, 2017) when the rectangular matrices are square.