Improved Lieb–Oxford bound on the indirect and exchange energies

The Lieb–Oxford inequality provides a lower bound on the Coulomb energy of a classical system of N identical charges only in terms of their one-particle density. We prove here a new estimate on the best constant in this inequality. Numerical evaluation provides the value 1.58, which is a significant improvement to the previously known value 1.64. The best constant has recently been shown to be larger than 1.44. In a second part, we prove that the constant can be reduced to 1.25 when the inequality is restricted to Hartree–Fock states. This is the first proof that the exchange term is always much lower than the full indirect Coulomb energy.