Extreme statistics and index distribution in the classical $1d$ Coulomb gas

Abstract: We consider a one-dimensional gas of $N$ charged particles confined by an external harmonic potential and interacting via the one-dimensional Coulomb potential. For this system we show that in equilibrium the charges settle, on an average, uniformly and symmetrically on a finite region centred around the origin. We study the statistics of the position of the rightmost particle $x_{\max}$ and show that the limiting distribution describing its typical fluctuations is different from the Tracy-Widom distribution found in the one-dimensional log-gas. We also compute the large deviation functions which characterise the atypical fluctuations of $x_{\max}$ far away from its mean value. In addition, we study the gap between the two rightmost particles as well as the index $N_+$, i.e., the number of particles on the positive semi-axis. We compute the limiting distributions associated to the typical fluctuations of these observables as well as the corresponding large deviation functions. We provide numerical supports to our analytical predictions. Part of these results were announced in a recent Letter, Phys. Rev. Lett. 119, 060601 (2017).