Thermal winding dominance of a free rotor (source code)

= Thermal winding dominance of a free rotor

For the <quantum rotor>, low <temperature> makes the angular-momentum sum converge fastest: n=0 gives $Z\to1$. High <temperature> makes the temporal winding sum converge fastest: m=0 gives $Z\sim\sqrt{2\pi I/(\beta\hbar^2)}$. At low <temperature> many winding sectors contribute and cancel the vanishing fixed-endpoint prefactor. A zero-winding approximation valid at high <temperature> cannot be extended to low <temperature> merely because winding paths look geometrically longer.