Phase transitions for dilute particle systems with Lennard-Jones potential (Q707586)

One of the basic problems of statistical mechanics is the study of interacting many-body systems in the thermodynamic limit. Here one tries to understand the transition between the gaseous and the solid phase at positive temperature and particle density, and to this end, one considers the simpler case when these two parameters vanish asymptotically with a given mutual relation on the critical scale. One introduces an empirical measure to characterize the graph structure which characterizes this kind of problems and all the study is expanded around its properties. One derives a large derivation principle for this measure and an asymptotic expansion for the minimal energy of an N-particle configuration.