On fluctuations of Coulomb systems and universality of the Heine distribution

Abstract: We consider a class of external potentials on the complex plane $\mathbb{C}$ for which the coincidence set to the obstacle problem contains a Jordan curve in the exterior of the droplet. We refer to this curve as a spectral outpost. We study the corresponding Coulomb gas at $\beta=2$. Generalizing recent work in the radially symmetric case, we prove that the number of particles which fall near the spectral outpost has an asymptotic Heine distribution, as the number of particles $n\to\infty$.We also consider a class of potentials with disconnected droplets whose connected components are separated by a ring-shaped spectral gap. We prove that the fluctuations of the number of particles that fall near a given component has an asymptotic discrete normal distribution, which depends on $n$. For the case of disconnected droplets we also consider fluctuations of general smooth linear statistics and show that they tend to distribute as the sum of a Gaussian field and an independent, oscillatory, discrete Gaussian field. Our techniques involve a new asymptotic formula on the norm of monic orthogonal polynomials in the bifurcation regime and a variant of the method of limit Ward identities of Ameur, Hedenmalm, and Makarov.