Third-order phase transition in random tilings

Third-Order Phase Transition: Random Matrices and Screened Coulomb Gas with Hard Walls

Consider the free energy of a d-dimensional gas in canonical equilibrium under pairwise repulsive interaction and global confinement, in presence of a volume constraint. When the volume of the gas is forced away from its typical value, the system undergoes a phase transition of the third order separating two phases (pulled and pushed). We prove this result (i) for the eigenvalues of one-cut, off-critical random matrices (log-gas in dimension d = 1 ) with hard walls; (ii) in arbitrary dimension d ≥ 1 for a gas with Yukawa interaction (aka screened Coulomb gas) in a generic confining potential. The latter class includes systems with Coulomb (long range) and delta (zero range) repulsion as limiting cases. In both cases, we obtain an exact formula for the free energy of the constrained gas which explicitly exhibits a jump in the third derivative, and we identify the 'electrostatic pressure' as the order parameter of the transition. Part of these results were announced in Cunden et al. (J Phys A 51:35LT01, 2018).

Exact Extremal Statistics in the Classical 1D Coulomb Gas

We consider a one-dimensional classical Coulomb gas of N-like charges in a harmonic potential-also known as the one-dimensional one-component plasma. We compute, analytically, the probability distribution of the position x_{max} of the rightmost charge in the limit of large N. We show that the typical fluctuations of x_{max} around its mean are described by a nontrivial scaling function, with asymmetric tails. This distribution is different from the Tracy-Widom distribution of x_{max} for Dyson's log gas. We also compute the large deviation functions of x_{max} explicitly and show that the system exhibits a third-order phase transition, as in the log gas. Our theoretical predictions are verified numerically.

Exact Short-Time Height Distribution in the One-Dimensional Kardar-Parisi-Zhang Equation and Edge Fermions at High Temperature

We consider the early time regime of the Kardar-Parisi-Zhang (KPZ) equation in 1+1 dimensions in curved (or droplet) geometry. We show that for short time t, the probability distribution P(H,t) of the height H at a given point x takes the scaling form P(H,t)∼exp[-Φ_{drop}(H)/sqrt[t]] where the rate function Φ_{drop}(H) is computed exactly for all H. While it is Gaussian in the center, i.e., for small H, the probability distribution function has highly asymmetric non-Gaussian tails that we characterize in detail. This function Φ_{drop}(H) is surprisingly reminiscent of the large deviation function describing the stationary fluctuations of finite-size models belonging to the KPZ universality class. Thanks to a recently discovered connection between the KPZ equation and free fermions, our results have interesting implications for the fluctuations of the rightmost fermion in a harmonic trap at high temperature and the full counting statistics at the edge.