On boundary confinements for the Coulomb gas

Abstract

We introduce a family of boundary confinements for Coulomb gas ensembles, and study them in the two-dimensional determinantal case of random normal matrices. The family interpolates between the free boundary and hard edge cases, which have been well studied in various random matrix theories. The confinement can also be relaxed beyond the free boundary to produce ensembles with more fuzzy boundaries, i.e., where the particles are more and more likely to be found outside of the boundary. The resulting ensembles are investigated with respect to scaling limits and distribution of the maximum modulus. In particular, we prove existence of a new point field - a limit of scaling limits to the ultraweak point when the droplet ceases to be well defined.