Anomalous free energy expansions of planar Coulomb gases: multi-component and conformal singularity

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the asymptotic behavior of the partition function of planar Coulomb gases with multi-component and conformal singularity features, revealing phase transitions, oscillatory constants, and connections to random matrix theory.

Contribution

It provides explicit asymptotic expansions for the partition function in different regimes, confirming conjectures and extending previous results in Coulomb gas and random matrix models.

Findings

Topological phase transition in droplet structure at critical t

Oscillatory behavior of constant term depending on n mod d

Connection to moments of the complex Ginibre ensemble

Abstract

We study the partition function $$ Z_n = \int_{\mathbb{C}^n } \prod_{1 \le j<k \le n} |z_{j}-z_{k}|^{2} \prod_{j=1}^{n} |z_j|^{2c}\, e^{-n V(z_{j})}\frac{d^{2}z_{j}}{\pi}, $$ where $c>-1$ and $$ V(z)= |z|^{2d}-t(z^{d}+\overline{z}^{d}), \qquad t >0, \, d \in \mathbb{N}. $$ The associated droplet reveals a topological phase transition: for $t > 1/\sqrt{d}$, it consists of $d$ connected components; whereas for $t < 1/\sqrt{d}$, it becomes simply connected and contains the origin, where a conformal singularity arises. In both regimes, we establish the asymptotic expansion $$ \log Z_n = C_1 n^2 + C_2 n \log n + C_3 n + C_4 \log n + C_5 + O(n^{-1}), $$ as $n \to \infty$, and derive all coefficients explicitly. In the multi-component regime $t > 1/\sqrt{d}$, the constant term $C_5$ exhibits an oscillatory behaviour that depends on the congruence class of $n$ modulo $d$. In particular, in the special case $c = 0$ with $n$ divisible by $d$, our result confirms a conjecture of Dea\~no and Simm. In contrast, in the conformal singularity regime $t < 1/\sqrt{d}$, the oscillatory behaviour disappears, while additional contributions in $C_4$ arise beyond the scope of the conjecture of Jancovici et al. As a special case $d = 1$, our result yields the asymptotic expansion for the moments of the characteristic polynomial of the complex Ginibre ensemble with finite exponent. In the bulk regime, we further derive the full expansion in powers of $1/N$, thereby providing a precise evaluation of the error term in the result of Webb and Wong.