Minimizers for Coulomb gases constrained to a halfspace

Abstract

We consider a family of optimization problems, based on a mean-field description of particles interacting through Coulomb forces in a quadratic trap. In addition, the particles are constrained to lie in a halfspace and we are interested in the way the particle distribution changes as the halfspace varies. In particular, we can prove the existence of a phase transition, thereby settling a recent conjecture by Byun, Forrester, Majumdar and Schehr.

16 pages, 1 figure; improved Theorem 1.1