A Universal Energy Functional for Trapped Fermi Gases with Large Scattering Length

Abstract

Yoram Alhassid conjectured that the total energy of a harmonically trapped two-component Fermi gas with large scattering length is a linear functional of the occupation probabilities of single-particle energy eigenstates. We confirm his conjecture and derive the functional explicitly. We show that the functional applies to ALL smooth potentials having a minimum, not just harmonic traps. We also calculate the occupation probabilities of high energy states.