Coulomb universality

Abstract

Motivated by a number of realizations of long-range interacting systems, including ultra-cold atomic and molecular gases, we study a neutral plasma with power-law interactions longer-ranged than Coulombic. We find that beyond a crossover length, such interactions are universally screened down to a standard Coulomb form in all spatial dimensions. This implies, counter-intuitively, that in two dimensions and below, such a "super-Coulombic" gas is asymptotically Coulombically confining at low temperatures. At higher temperatures, the plasma undergoes a deconfining transition that in two dimensions is the same Kosterlitz-Thouless transition that occurs in a conventional Coulomb gas, but at an elevated temperature that we calculate. We also predict that in contrast, above two dimensions, even when naively the bare potential is confining, there is no confined phase of the plasma at any nonzero temperature. In addition, the super-Coulomb to Coulomb crossover is followed at longer length scales by an unconventional "Debye-Huckel" screening, which leads to faster-than-Coulombic, power-law decay of the screened potential, in contrast to the usual exponentially decaying Yukawa potential. Furthermore, we show that power-law potentials, that fall off more rapidly than Coulomb, are screened down to a shorter-ranged power-law, rather than an exponential Debye-Huckel Yukawa form. We expect these prediction to be testable in simulations, and hope they will inspire experimental studies in various platforms.