Debye screening for jellium and other Coulomb systems

Debye screening is proven for a large class of classical Coulomb gases at low densities. Among the models treated are jellium systems (where particles interact with a fixed background charge), systems with arbitrarily dilute fractional charges, and systems where the charges are not integrally related. The interaction potentials of the corresponding sine-Gordon models may have no symmetry and can have infinitely many stationary points which are degenerate or nearly degenerate in energy.Junior Fellow, Harvard University Society of Fellows. Supported in part by the National Science Foundation under Grant No. PHY79-16812