# Archive ouverte HAL – Non-interacting fermions in hard-edge potentials

### Bertrand Lacroix-A-Chez-Toine 1 Pierre Le Doussal 2 Satya Majumdar 1 Gregory Schehr 1

#### Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment, IOP Science, 2018, 2018 (12), pp.123103. 〈10.1088/1742-5468/aaeda0〉

We consider the spatial quantum and thermal fluctuations of non-interacting Fermi gases of $N$ particles confined in $d$-dimensional non-smooth potentials. We first present a thorough study of the spherically symmetric pure hard-box potential, with vanishing potential inside the box, both at $T=0$ and $T>0$. We find that the correlations near the wall are described by a "hard edge" kernel, which depend both on $d$ and $T$, and which is different from the "soft edge" Airy kernel, and its higher $d$ generalizations, found for smooth potentials. We extend these results to the case where the potential is non-uniform inside the box, and find that there exists a family of kernels which interpolate between the above "hard edge" kernel and the "soft edge" kernels. Finally, we consider one-dimensional singular potentials of the form $V(x)\sim |x|^{-\gamma}$ with $\gamma>0$. We show that the correlations close to the singularity at $x=0$ are described by this "hard edge" kernel for $1\leq\gamma<2$ while they are described by a broader family of "hard edge" kernels known as the Bessel kernel for $\gamma=2$ and, finally by the Airy kernel for $\gamma>2$. These one-dimensional kernels also appear in random matrix theory, and we provide here the mapping between the $1d$ fermion models and the corresponding random matrix ensembles. Part of these results were announced in a recent Letter, EPL 120, 10006 (2017).

• 1. LPTMS - Laboratoire de Physique Théorique et Modèles Statistiques
• 2. LPTENS - Laboratoire de Physique Théorique de l'ENS