Many-flavor Schwinger model at finite chemical potential

Abstract: We study thermodynamic properties of the Schwinger model on a torus with f flavors of massless fermions and flavor-dependent chemical potentials. Generalizing the two-flavor case, we present a representation of the partition function in the form of a multidimensional theta function and show that the model exhibits a rich phase structure at zero temperature. The different phases, characterized by certain values of the particle numbers, are separated by first-order phase transitions. We work out the phase structure in detail for three and four fermion flavors and conjecture, based on an exploratory investigation of the five, six, and eight flavor case, that the maximal number of coexisting phases at zero temperature grows exponentially with increasing f.