Pairing and thermodynamics properties of finite-systems with fixed number of particles

A canonical description of the thermodynamical pairing properties of small systems is achieved by using the Variation After Projection approach at finite temperature. The minimization of the free energy is made by a direct evaluation of the energy and full diagonalization of the entropy. We use the Richardson – pairing model whose exact solution allows to study the reliability of different approaches. We show that the Projection After Variation approach, that is usually performed at zero temperature with rather good success, provides a quite poor description at finite temperature. On the contrary, the Variation After Projection applied at finite temperature provides a perfect reproduction of the exact canonical properties of odd or even systems from very low to high temperature.