Part I. The 2D classical Coulomb gas near the zero-density Kosterlitz-Thouless critical point: Correlations and critical line

Abstract

The 2D classical Coulomb gas undergoes the famous Kosterlitz-Thouless (KT) transition between a high-temperature conducting phase and a low-temperature insulating phase. We present various studies of the correlations in the insulating phase near the zero-density critical point. First, we briefly recall the phenomenological approach of Kosterlitz and Thouless. This theory predicts that the decay of the charge correlation is entirely controlled by the bare Coulomb potential between opposite charges only renormalized by the dielectric constante. Then, we present an analysis of the low-fugacity expansions of the correlations. The particle correlations are found to decay as 1/r⁴. The large-distance decay of the charge correlation is shown to be tightly related to the behavior of l/s in the regime of interest. Systematic resummations allow one to recover the algebraic decay predicted by the heuristic KT model. This settles on a rigorous basis various assumptions of this model. In particular, the nested pair mechanism naturally arises in the resummation scheme. Finally, we describe the phase diagram of the system according to the most recent calculations which include finite-density effects.