paper

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

arXiv:2506.05461 · doi:10.1103/4q5z-4wkn

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.

arXiv comment12 pages, 15 figures; accepted as a Letter in Physical Review E

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