Lower Bounds to the Ground-State Energy of Systems Containing Identical Particles

Abstract

Lower bounds to the ground-state energy of a system composed of N identical particles interacting by two-body forces (and possibly also with an external potential) are derived. They are expressed in terms of the ground-state energies of (simpler) systems composed of a smaller number of particles having masses and/or interactions different from the original ones. This reduction process may be continued all the way down to systems involving one and two particles only. The generalization to systems containing some identical and some distinguishable particles is also discussed.