Minimization of energy per particle among Bravais lattices in R^2 : Lennard-Jones and Thomas-Fermi cases

Abstract

We study the two dimensional Lennard-Jones energy per particle of lattices and we prove that the minimizer among Bravais lattices with sufficiently large density is triangular and that is not the case for sufficiently small density. We give other results about the global minimizer of this energy. Moreover we study the energy per particle stemming from Thomas-Fermi model in two dimensions and we prove that the minimizer among Bravais lattices with fixed density is triangular. We use a result of Montgomery from Number Theory about the minimization of Theta functions in the plane.