Quasipinning and its relevance for $N$-Fermion quantum states

Abstract

Fermionic natural occupation numbers (NON) do not only obey Pauli's famous exclusion principle but are even further restricted to a polytope by the generalized Pauli constraints, conditions which follow from the fermionic exchange statistics. Whenever given NON are pinned to the polytope's boundary the corresponding $N$-fermion quantum state $|\Psi_N\rangle$ simplifies due to a selection rule. We show analytically and numerically for the most relevant settings that this rule is stable for NON close to the boundary, if the NON are non-degenerate. In case of degeneracy a modified selection rule is conjectured and its validity is supported. As a consequence the recently found effect of quasipinning is physically relevant in the sense that its occurrence allows to approximately reconstruct $|\Psi_N\rangle$, its entanglement properties and correlations from 1-particle information. Our finding also provides the basis for a generalized Hartree-Fock method by a variational ansatz determined by the selection rule.