Coulomb gases under constraint: some theoretical and numerical results

Abstract

We consider Coulomb gas models for which the empirical measure typically concentrates, when the number of particles becomes large, on an equilibrium measure minimizing an electrostatic energy. We study the behavior when the gas is conditioned on a rare event. We first show that the special case of quadratic confinement and linear constraint is exactly solvable due to a remarkable factorization, and that the conditioning has then the simple effect of shifting the cloud of particles without deformation. To address more general cases, we perform a theoretical asymptotic analysis relying on a large deviations technique known as the Gibbs conditioning principle. The technical part amounts to establishing that the conditioning ensemble is an I-continuity set of the energy. This leads to characterizing the conditioned equilibrium measure as the solution of a modified variational problem. For simplicity, we focus on linear statistics and on quadratic statistics constraints. Finally, we numerically illustrate our predictions and explore cases in which no explicit solution is known. For this, we use a Generalized Hybrid Monte Carlo algorithm for sampling from the conditioned distribution for a finite but large system.