Particle Statistics, Frustration, and Ground-State Energy

We study the connections among particle statistics, frustration, and ground-state energy in quantum many-particle systems. In the absence of interaction, the influence of particle statistics on the ground-state energy is trivial: the ground-state energy of noninteracting bosons is lower than that of free fermions because of Bose-Einstein condensation and Pauli exclusion principle. In the presence of hard-core or other interaction, however, the comparison is not trivial. Nevertheless, the ground-state energy of hard-core bosons is proved to be lower than that of spinless fermions, if all the hopping amplitudes are nonnegative. The condition can be understood as the absence of frustration among hoppings. By mapping the many-body Hamiltonian to a tight-binding model on a fictitious lattice, we show that the Fermi statistics of the original particles introduces an effective magnetic flux in the fictitious lattice. The latter can be regarded as a frustration, since it leads to a destructive interference among different paths along which a single particle is propagating. If we introduce hopping frustration, the hopping frustration is expected to compete with "effective frustration", leading to the possibility that the ground-state energy of hard-core bosons can be higher than that of fermions. We present several examples, in which the ground-state energy of hard-core bosons is proved to be higher than that of fermions due to the hopping frustration. The basic ideas were reported in a recent Letter [W.-X. Nie, H. Katsura, and M. Oshikawa, Phys. Rev. Lett. 111, 100402 (2013)]; more details and several extensions, including one to the spinful case, are discussed in the present paper.