Ideal mixture approximation of cluster size distributions at low density (Q438822)

Interacting particle systems in a continuous configuration space are investigated. Usually an interacting particle gas is treated as an approximately ideal mixture of droplets. This droplet picture has been used in many different investigations and is quite common -- all existing results work in the grand-canonical ensemble at sufficiently negative values of the chemical potential, for which one expects that all droplets are finite. In this article, this droplet picture is considered rigorously, and this allows to obtain results that hold also in a regime where there might be infinite clusters. The authors consider free energies, the constrained energies with fixed cluster size distributions and the optimal distribution itself, and derive bounds for the deviation from the ideal model. These bounds decay exponentially fast as a function of the inverse temperature at low densities, respectively they decay as a power of the density.