Non-Archimedean electrostatics

Abstract

We introduce ensembles of repelling charged particles restricted to a ball in a non-archimedean field (such as the p p -adic rational numbers) with interaction energy between pairs of particles proportional to the logarithm of the ( p p -adic) distance between them. In the canonical ensemble, a system of N N particles is put in contact with a heat bath at fixed inverse temperature β \beta and energy is allowed to flow between the system and the heat bath. Using standard axioms of statistical physics, the relative density of states is given by the β \beta power of the ( p p -adic) absolute value of the Vandermonde determinant in the locations of the particles. The partition function is the normalizing constant (as a function of β \beta ) of this ensemble, and we identify a recursion that allows this to be computed explicitly in finite time. Probabilities of interest, including the probabilities that fixed subsets will have a prescribed number of particles, and the conditional distribution of particles within a subset given a prescribed occupation number, are given explicitly in terms of the partition function. We then turn to the grand canonical ensemble where both the energy and number of particles are variable. We compute similar probabilities to those in the canonical ensemble and show how these probabilities can be given in terms the canonical and grand canonical partition functions. Finally, we briefly consider the multi-component ensemble where particles are allowed to take different integer charges, and we connect basic properties of this ensemble to the canonical and grand canonical ensembles.