Stable Configurations of Repelling Points on Flat Tori

Abstract

Abstract Flat tori are analyzed in the context of an intrinsic Fourier-analytic approach to electrostatics on Riemannian manifolds, introduced by one of the authors in 1984 and previously developed for compact hyperbolic manifolds. The approach covers a large class of repelling laws, but does not naturally include laws with singularities at the origin, for which possible accommodations are discussed in the final section of the paper.