Cycles of Random Permutations with Restricted Cycle Lengths

We prove some general results about the asymptotics of the distribution of the number of cycles of given length of a random permutation whose distribution is invariant under conjugation. These results were first established to be applied in a forthcoming paper [BG], where we prove results about cycles of random permutations which can be written as free words in several independent random permutations. However, we also apply them here to prove asymptotic results about random permutations with restricted cycle lengths. More specifically, for A a set of positive integers, we consider a random permutation chosen uniformly among the permutations of {1, . . . , n} which have all their cycle lengths in A, and then let n tend to infinity. Improving slightly a recent result of Yakymiv [Y07], we prove that under a general hypothesis on A, the numbers of cycles with fixed lengths of this random permutation are asymptotically independent and distributed according to Poisson distributions. In the case where A is finite, we prove that the behavior of these random variables is completely different: cycles with length maxA are predominant.