Zero-free neighborhoods around the unit circle for Kac polynomials

In this paper, we study how the roots of the Kac polynomials $$W_n(z) = \sum _{k=0}^{n-1} \xi _k z^k$$ W n ( z ) = ∑ k = 0 n - 1 ξ k z k concentrate around the unit circle when the coefficients of $$W_n$$ W n are independent and identically distributed nondegenerate real random variables. It is well known that the roots of a Kac polynomial concentrate around the unit circle as $$n\rightarrow \infty $$ n → ∞ if and only if $${\mathbb {E}}[\log ( 1+ |\xi _0|)]<\infty $$ E [ log ( 1 + | ξ 0 | ) ] < ∞ . Under the condition $${\mathbb {E}}[\xi ^2_0]<\infty $$ E [ ξ 0 2 ] < ∞ , we show that there exists an annulus of width $${\text {O}}(n^{-2}(\log n)^{-3})$$ O ( n - 2 ( log n ) - 3 ) around the unit circle which is free of roots with probability $$1-{\text {O}}({(\log n)^{-{1}/{2}}})$$ 1 - O ( ( log n ) - 1 / 2 ) . The proof relies on small ball probability inequalities and the least common denominator used in [17].