The Coulomb gas, potential theory and phase transitions

Robert J. Berman

Published 2018-11-26Version 1

We give a potential-theoretic characterization of measures which have the property that the corresponding Coulomb gas is "well-behaved" and similarly for more general Riesz gases. This means that the laws of the empirical measures of the corresponding random point process satisfy a Large Deviation Principle with a rate functional which depends continuously on the temperature, in the sense of Gamma-convergence. Equivalently, there is no zeroth-order phase transition at zero temperature. This is shown to be the case for the Hausdorff measure on a Lipschitz hypersurface. We also provide explicit examples of measures which are absolutely continuous with respect to Lesbesgue measure, such that the corresponding 2d Coulomb exhibits a zeroth-order phase transition. This is based on relations to Ullman's criterion in the theory of orthogonal polynomials and Bernstein-Markov inequalities.