RIGOROUS LOWER BOUNDS ON THE GROUND-STATE ENERGY OF CORRELATED FERMI SYSTEMS

We show that the thermodynamic potential E-mu-N of an itinerant interacting Fermi system is bounded below by the sum of the thermodynamic potentials of small subsystems into which the infinite system is partitioned. Exact lower bounds for the energy in the thermodynamic limit are therefore easily obtainable by diagonalization of small clusters. In one dimension, these bounds are remarkably close to Bethe-ansatz results for the Hubbard model. We present lower bounds for the two-dimensional Hubbard and t-J Hamiltonians. Such bounds may serve as rigorous tests for approximate treatments of this class of problems.