Statistical Mechanics in Collective Coordinates

We study the transformation of the statistical mechanics of N particles to the statistical mechanics of fields, that are the collective coordinates, describing the system. We give an explicit expression for the functional Fourier transform of the Jacobian of the transformation from particle to collective coordinate and derive the Fokker-Planck equation in terms of the collective coordinates. Simple approximations, leading to Debye-Huckel theory and to the hard sphere Percus-Yevick equation are discussed.