Thomas and Fermi

The other day the Thomas-Fermi model (and its enhancements by Dirac and others) wandered across my desk (and one of my virtual blackboards as you can see in the picture) for a while. Putting aside why it showed up (perhaps I will say later on, but I cannot now), it was fun to delve for a while into some of these early attempts in quantum mechanics to try to understand approximation methods for treating fairly complicated quantum systems (like atoms of various sizes). The basic model showed up in 1927, just a year after Schrodinger’s equation. Some googling led me to a Wikipedia page’s summary, which I messed around on for a while, and also to that nice 1976 review paper of Elliot Lieb about the stability of matter that I think I remember reading (a small part of) a long time ago. I recommend it. (A pdf scan is here, and the reference is E. Lieb, Rec. Mod. Phys. 48 (1976) 553.

I had to break off all this because of various deadlines on things like grant applications, but it was a rather nice distraction.

-cvj