A Coulomb gas is simply a system of interacting particles in which the interaction is of Coulomb type (repulsive). Replacing the Coulomb repulsion by a more general interaction leads to the versatile concept of log-gas. These stochastic models appear naturally in classical physics and analysis. They are at the heart of several high dimensional universality phenomena related to the spectral analysis of random matrix models. They also appear in other fields such as complex geometry and partial differential equations. To learn more on these models, a day (March 21, 2014) is devoted to recent advances on log-gases at Institut Henri Poincaré (Paris). Feel free to register!
You might also be interested by Théorèmes de de Finetti, Limites de Champ Moyen et Condensation de Bose-Einstein by Nicolas Rougerie and by Limite de champ moyen et condensation de Bose-Einstein by Mathieu Lewin.