Symmetry-breaking Hartree--Fock solutions in a many-body system
MANUEL DE LLANO
Abstract
Systems of N(>>1) fermions (or bosons) interacting via either repulsive long-ranged forces (e.g., Coulomb) or short-ranged forces (e.g., repulsive barrier plus attractive Yukawa tail) are clearly of interest in problems from nuclear physics to astrophysics. By comparing expectation values for determinants (or permanents) of plane-wave orbitals in the lowest kinetic-energy state, and Wannier-like orbitals localized in the points of a perfect lattice, the conditions on the coupling and particle density for the existence of energetically-preferred, spatially-periodic, nontrivial (i.e.. nonplane-wave) solutions to the Hartree - Fock equations were deduced. That an electron gas in a crystalline confirmation, the Wigner solid,'' has lower energy than the fluid (plane-waves) configuration at low densities (or all densities, if the charge is increased indefinitely) can be shown to imply the existence of lower-energy, spatially-periodic HF solutions. Analogously, for the short-ranged force case cited before one can show very simply that a determinant (or permanent) of nonover-lapping Wannier orbitals gives lower energy for high enough repulsive barrier in an intermediate range of densities (or all densities if the barrier height is increased indefinitely to the hard core limit) in three dimensions. Lower-energy non-trivial solutions therefore emerge under these conditions, giving a finite energy per particle evenmore » in the hard core limit. These results differ qualitatively from the one-dimensional case first studied by Overhauser and agree with those conjectured for 3-dimensions by several subsequent authors. The inclusion of attractive forces can, moreover, provide a condensed (negative energy) spatiallyperiodic state lower than the trivial state. One can furthermore show that there will exist a whole family of aperiodic singledeterminantal states of higher (but finite) energy than the perfect hep lattice state but lower still than the trivial state. (auth)« less