On the absence of intermediate phases in the two-dimensional Coulomb gas

For a simple, continuum two-dimensional Coulomb gas (with soft cutoff), Gallavotti and Nicoló [J. Stat. Phys.38:133–156 (1985)] have proved the existence of finite coefficients in the Mayer activity expansion up to order 2n below a series of temperature thresholdsT_n=T[1+(2n–1)^–1] (n=1, 2,...). With this in mind they conjectured that an infinite sequence of intermediate, multipole phases appears between the exponentially screened plasma phase aboveT₁ and the full, unscreened Kosterilitz-Thouless phase belowTT_KT. We demonstrate that Debye-Hückel-Bjerrum theory, as recently investigated ford=2 dimensions, provides a natural and quite probably correct explanation of the pattern of finite Mayer coefficients while indicating the totalabsence of any intermediate phases at nonzero density ; only the KT phase extends to >0.