Rigorous description of exchange-correlation energy of many-electron systems.

With the eigenfunctional theory, we study a general interacting electron system, and give a rigorous expression of its ground state energy, which is composed of two parts: one part is contributed by the non-interacting electrons, and the other one is represented by the correlation functions that are controlled by the electron correlation. Moreover, according to the rigorous expression of the ground state energy, an effective scheme beyond the local density approximation of the density functional theory is proposed. As a simple example for a spin-1/2 XXZ chain, under the linear approximation in solving the equation of the phase field, the ground state energy obtained by the present scheme is quite close to that of the Bethe ansatz.