In a system of interacting fermions, the correlation energy is defined as the difference between the energy of the ground state and the one of the free Fermi gas. We consider $N$ interacting spin $1/2$ fermions in the dilute regime, i.e., $\rho\ll 1$ where $\rho$ is the total density of the system. We rigorously derive a first order upper bound for the correlation energy with an optimal error term of the order $\mathcal{ O}(\rho^{ 7/3})$ in the thermodynamic limit. Moreover, we improve the lower bound estimate with respect to previous results getting an error $\mathcal{ O}(\rho^{ 2+1/5})$.
Categories: math-ph math.MP