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 $$ ) with hard walls; (ii) in arbitrary dimension $$ 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).