Universal ground-state properties of free fermions in a d-dimensional trap

The ground-state properties of N spinless free fermions in a d-dimensional confining potential are studied. We find that any n-point correlation function has a simple determinantal structure that allows us to compute several properties exactly for large N. We show that the average density has a finite support with an edge, and near this edge the density exhibits a universal (valid for a wide class of potentials) scaling behavior for large N. The associated edge scaling function is computed exactly and generalizes to any d the edge electron gas result of Kohn and Mattsson in d = 3 (Kohn W. and Mattsson A. E., Phys. Rev. Lett., 81 (1998) 3487). In addition, we calculate the kernel (that characterizes any n-point correlation function) for large N and show that, when appropriately scaled, it depends only on dimension d, but has otherwise universal scaling forms, at the edges. The edge kernel, for higher d, generalizes the Airy kernel in one dimension, well known from the random matrix theory. Copyright (C) EPLA, 2015