Mean field dynamics of fermions and the time-dependent Hartree–Fock equation

Abstract

The time-dependent Hartree–Fock equations are derived from the N-body linear Schrödinger equation with the mean-field scaling in the limit N→+∞ and for initial data that are close to Slater determinants. Only the case of bounded, symmetric binary interaction potentials is treated in this work. We prove that, as N→+∞, the first partial trace of the N-body density operator approaches the solution of the time-dependent Hartree–Fock equations (in operator form) in the sense of the trace norm.