The product formula for the spherical functions on symmetric spaces of noncompact type.
We show that the explicit formula of Stanley-Féray-Śniady for the characters of the symmetric group has a natural extension to the generalized characters. These are the spherical functions of the unbalanced Gel’fand pair .
The Wigner Theorem states that the statistical distribution of the eigenvalues of a random Hermitian matrix converges to the semi-circular law as the dimension goes to infinity. It is possible to establish this result by using harmonic analysis on the Heisenberg group. In fact this convergence corresponds to the topology of the set of spherical functions associated to the action of the unitary group on the Heisenberg group.