The Pauli exclusion principle is a constraint on the natural occupation numbers of fermionic states. It has been suspected since at least the 1970s, and only proved very recently, that there is a multitude of further constraints on these numbers, generalizing the Pauli principle. Here, we provide the first analytic analysis of the physical relevance of these constraints. We compute the natural occupation numbers for the ground states of a family of interacting fermions in a harmonic potential. Intriguingly, we find that the occupation numbers are almost, but not exactly, pinned to the boundary of the allowed region (quasipinned). The result suggests that the physics behind the phenomenon is richer than previously appreciated. In particular, it shows that for some models, the generalized Pauli constraints play a role for the ground state, even though they do not limit the ground-state energy. Our findings suggest a generalization of the Hartree-Fock approximation.

A recent development in quantum chemistry has established the quantum mutual information between orbitals as a major descriptor of electronic structure. This has already facilitated remarkable improvements in numerical methods and may lead to a more comprehensive foundation for chemical bonding theory. Building on this promising development, our work provides a refined discussion of quantum information theoretical concepts by introducing the physical correlation and its separation into classical and quantum parts as distinctive quantifiers of electronic structure. In particular, we succeed in quantifying the entanglement. Intriguingly, our results for different molecules reveal that the total correlation between orbitals is mainly classical, raising questions about the general significance of entanglement in chemical bonding. Our work also shows that implementing the fundamental particle number superselection rule, so far not accounted for in quantum chemistry, removes a major part of correlation and entanglement seen previously. In that respect, realizing quantum information processing tasks with molecular systems might be more challenging than anticipated.

A crucial theorem in Reduced Density Matrix Functional Theory (RDMFT) suggests that the universal pure and ensemble functional coincide on their common domain of pure N -representable one-matrices. We refute this by a comprehensive analysis of the geometric picture underlying Levy's constrained search. Moreover, we then show that the ensemble functional follows instead as the lower convex envelop of the pure functional. It is particularly remarkable that the pure functional determines the ensemble functional even outside its own domain of pure N -representable one-matrices. From a general perspective, this demonstrates that relaxing pure RDMFT to ensemble RDMFT does not necessarily circumvent the complexity of the one-body pure Nrepresentability conditions (generalized Pauli constraints). Instead, the complexity may simply be transferred from the underlying space of pure N -representable one-matrices to the structure of the universal one-matrix functional.