Emergent Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless deconfinement in super-Coulombic plasmas

TL;DR

This paper investigates phase transitions in two-dimensional super-Coulombic plasmas with long-range interactions, revealing a BKT-type charge deconfinement transition through large-scale simulations and novel screening methodologies.

Contribution

It demonstrates the existence of a BKT transition in super-Coulombic plasmas and introduces a new test charge method to analyze emergent Coulomb interactions.

Findings

Charge confinement-deconfinement transition observed

Transition belongs to BKT universality class

Universal emergence of Coulomb potential across interactions

Abstract

We study the statistical mechanics of two-dimensional "super-Coulombic" plasmas, namely, neutral plasmas with power-law interactions longer-ranged than Coulomb. To that end, we employ numerically exact large-scale Monte Carlo simulations. Contrary to naive energy-entropy arguments, we observe a charge confinement-deconfinement transition as a function of temperature. Remarkably, the transition lies in the Berezinskii-Kosterlitz-Thouless (BKT) universality class. Our results corroborate recent dielectric medium and renormalization group calculations predicting effective long-scale Coulomb interactions in microscopically super-Coulombic gases. We explicitly showcase this novel dielectric screening phenomenon, capturing the emergent Coulomb potential and the associated crossover length scale. This is achieved by utilizing a new test charge based methodology for determining effective inter-particle interactions. Lastly, we show that this Coulomb emergence and the associated BKT transition occur universally across generic interactions and densities.