Copyright © 2009 M. Enstedt and M. Melgaard. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

Abstract

We establish existence of infinitely many distinct solutions to the semilinear elliptic Hartree-Fock equations for N-electron Coulomb systems with quasirelativistic kinetic energy −α−2Δxn+α−4−α−2 for the nth electron. Moreover, we prove existence of a ground state. The results are valid under the hypotheses that the total charge Ztot of K nuclei is greater than N−1 and that Ztot is smaller than a critical charge Zc. The proofs are based on a new application of the Fang-Ghoussoub critical point approach to multiple solutions on a noncompact Riemannian manifold, in combination with density operator techniques.