Hard-core square-well fermions

Abstract

Based on the well-known low-density expansion for the ground-state energy per particle of a many-fermion system interacting pairwise via a central potential we develop a perturbation scheme in which the zero-order state is that of the purely-repulsive-spheres fluid. For the hard-core plus square-well pair-interaction case we have deduced, for two-species fermion matter, perturbation formulas up to sixth order in the attractive coupling parameter. We explicitly report results up to fourth order here. Pad\'e-approximant analyses in the density are carried out in each order with the intent of providing the basis necessary for extensive equation-of-state calculations of various many-fermion systems. In particular, for zero order (the fermion hard-sphere fluid) we predict an uncertainty-principle divergence in the energy, and hence pressure, corresponding to the random close packing of spheres, at a density of about 0.5 times the recently obtained value for boson hard spheres and about 0.2 times the well-known empirical value for classical hard spheres.