  The physical properties of a classical many-particle system with interactions
given by a repulsive Gaussian pair potential are extended to arbitrarily high
Euclidean dimensions. The goals of this paper are to characterize the behavior
of the pair correlation function (pcf) in various density regimes and to
understand the phase properties of the Gaussian core model (GCM) as
parametrized by dimension d. To this end, we explore the fluid and crystalline
solid phases. For the dilute regime of the fluid phase, a cluster expansion of
the pcf in reciprocal temperature is presented, the coefficients of which may
be evaluated analytically due to the nature of the Gaussian potential. We
present preliminary results concerning the convergence properties of this
expansion. The analytical cluster expansion is related to numerical
approximations for the pcf in the dense fluid regime by utilizing hypernetted
chain, Percus-Yevick, and mean-field closures to the Ornstein-Zernike equation.
Based on the results of these comparisons, we provide evidence in support of a
decorrelation principle for the GCM in high Euclidean dimensions. In the solid
phase, we consider the behavior of the freezing temperature in the limit of
zero density and show that it approaches zero itself in this limit for any d
via a collective coordinate argument. Duality relations with respect to the
energies of a lattice and its dual are then discussed, and these relations aid
in the Maxwell double-tangent construction of phase coexistence regions between
dual lattices based on lattice summation energies. The results from this
analysis are used to draw conclusions about the ground-state structures of the
GCM for a given dimension.
