Harmonically trapped jellium

Abstract

We discuss the model of a $D$-dimensional confined electron gas in which the particles are trapped by a harmonic potential. In particular, we study the non-interacting kinetic and exchange energies of finite-size inhomogeneous systems, and compare the resulting Thomas-Fermi and Dirac coefficients with various uniform electron gas paradigms. We show that, in the thermodynamic limit, the properties of this model are identical to those of the $D$-dimensional Fermi gas.