Local microscopic behavior for 2D Coulomb gases

The study of two-dimensional Coulomb gases lies at the interface of statistical physics and non-Hermitian random matrix theory. In this paper we give a large deviation principle (LDP) for the empirical fields obtained, under the canonical Gibbs measure, by zooming around a point in the bulk of the equilibrium measure, up to the finest averaging scale N^{- 1 / 2 + ε}. The rate function is given by the sum of the “renormalized energy” of Serfaty et al. weighted by the inverse temperature, and of the specific relative entropy. We deduce a local law which quantifies the convergence of the empirical measures of the particles to the equilibrium measure, up to the finest scale.