Bound on the Excess Charge of Generalized Thomas-Fermi-Weizsäcker Functionals

Abstract

We bound the number of electrons $Q$ that an atom can bind in excess of neutrality for density functionals generalizing the classical Thomas-Fermi-Weizsäcker functional: instead of the classical power $5/3$ more general powers $p$ are considered. For $3/2<p<2$ we prove the excess charge conjecture, i.e., that $Q$ is uniformly bounded in the atomic number $Z$. The case $p=3/2$ is critical: the behavior changes from a uniform bound in $Z$ to a linear bound at the critical coupling $4\sqrt{\pi }$ of the nonlinear term. We also improve the linear bound for all $p\ge 6/5$.