Asymptotics of generalized Bessel functions and weight multiplicities via large deviations of radial Dunkl processes

This paper studies the asymptotic behavior of several central objects in Dunkl theory as the dimension of the underlying space grows large. Our starting point is the observation that a recent result from the random matrix theory literature implies a large deviations principle for the hydrodynamic limit of radial Dunkl processes. Using this fact, we prove a variational formula for the large-N asymptotics of generalized Bessel functions, as well as a large deviations principle for the more general family of radial Heckman–Opdam processes. As an application, we prove a theorem on the asymptotic behavior of weight multiplicities of irreducible representations of compact or complex simple Lie algebras in the limit of large rank. The theorems in this paper generalize several known results describing analogous asymptotics for Dyson Brownian motion, spherical matrix integrals, and Kostka numbers.