Symmetry breaking in the liquid drop model with screened interactions
Abstract
We investigate liquid drop models with screened Riesz-type interactions, focusing in particular on truncated Coulomb and Yukawa potentials in three dimensions. While in the classical Gamow model with Coulomb interaction the only minimizers are balls, as recently proved by Chodosh and Gianocca (2026), we show that this is no longer true if the interaction is screened. In the case of truncated Coulomb and Yukawa potentials, we prove that for some values of the parameter, there exist connected minimizers which are not balls. For truncated Coulomb potentials, we further obtain genuine symmetry breaking by showing existence of non-radial connected minimizers. This gives the first evidence of minimizers which are not balls in three dimensions, and the first evidence of non-radial minimizers altogether, in the class of radial kernels. Our approach relies on a comparison of the energy-per-mass ratios of balls, core-shells and cylinders.
Related
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BibTeX
@misc{bronsard2026symmetry,
title = {{Symmetry breaking in the liquid drop model with screened interactions}},
author = {Lia Bronsard and Benoît Merlet and Marc Pegon},
howpublished = {HAL},
year = {2026},
month = sep,
url = {https://hal.science/hal-05312584v3},
note = {CC BY 4.0},
}
RIS
TY - UNPB
TI - Symmetry breaking in the liquid drop model with screened interactions
AU - Lia Bronsard
AU - Benoît Merlet
AU - Marc Pegon
PY - 2026
DA - 2026/09/06
PB - HAL
UR - https://hal.science/hal-05312584v3
AB - We investigate liquid drop models with screened Riesz-type interactions, focusing in particular on truncated Coulomb and Yukawa potentials in three dimensions. While in the classical Gamow model with Coulomb interaction the only minimizers are balls, as recently proved by Chodosh and Gianocca (2026), we show that this is no longer true if the interaction is screened. In the case of truncated Coulomb and Yukawa potentials, we prove that for some values of the parameter, there exist connected minimizers which are not balls. For truncated Coulomb potentials, we further obtain genuine symmetry breaking by showing existence of non-radial connected minimizers. This gives the first evidence of minimizers which are not balls in three dimensions, and the first evidence of non-radial minimizers altogether, in the class of radial kernels. Our approach relies on a comparison of the energy-per-mass ratios of balls, core-shells and cylinders.
ER -