Dilute and collapsed phases of the self-gravitating gas

The self-gravitating gas in thermal equilibrium is studied using a Newtonian potential regularized at short distances. This short distance cutoff permits us to obtain a complete description of the gas including its collapsed phase. We give a field theory description of the N-body regularized self-gravitating gas in the canonical ensemble. The corresponding functional integral is dominated in the N -> infinity limit by saddle points which provide a mean field description. The well-known dilute solutions (isothermal spheres) are recovered. We find new solutions which are regular in the regularized theory but become singular in the zero cutoff limit. They describe collapsed configurations where the particles are densely concentrated in a region of the size of the cutoff. These collapsed solutions provide the absolute minimum of the free energy. We find further new solutions which interpolate between the collapsed and the dilute configurations and describe tunneling processes where the gas collapses. The transition probability for such collapse processes turns out to be extremely small for large N. That is, the dilute solutions are in practice stable in the regime where they are locally stable. (C) 2006 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.