Permutation invariant matrix quantum thermodynamics and negative specific heat capacities in large N systems

TL;DR

This paper investigates the thermodynamics of permutation invariant matrix quantum systems, revealing phase transitions, negative specific heat, and connections to gravity via AdS/CFT, with implications for large N systems.

Contribution

It introduces a detailed analysis of thermodynamic phases, including negative specific heat, in permutation invariant matrix quantum systems and links these findings to gravity models.

Findings

Identifies a phase transition characterized by a specific heat peak at a temperature scaling with N.

Discovers negative specific heat in the low-energy phase for finite N.

Shows similar thermodynamic behavior in systems with U(N) symmetry and tensor models.

Abstract

We study the thermodynamic properties of the simplest gauged permutation invariant matrix quantum mechanical system of oscillators, for general matrix size $N$. In the canonical ensemble, the model has a transition at a temperature $T$ given by $x = e^{ -1/ T } \sim x_c=e^{-1/T_c}=\frac{\log N}{N}$, characterised by a sharp peak in the specific heat capacity (SHC), which separates a high temperature from a low temperature region. The peak grows and the low-temperature region shrinks to zero with increasing $N$. In the micro-canonical ensemble, for finite $N$, there is a low energy phase with negative SHC and a high energy phase with positive SHC. The low-energy phase is dominated by a super-exponential growth of degeneracies as a function of energy which is directly related to the rapid growth in the number of directed graphs, with any number of vertices, as a function of the number of edges. The two ensembles have matching behaviour above the transition temperature. We further provide evidence that these thermodynamic properties hold in systems with $U(N)$ symmetry such as the zero charge sector of the 2-matrix model and in certain tensor models. We discuss the implications of these observations for the negative specific heat capacities in gravity using the AdS/CFT correspondence.