A center-of-mass principle for the multiparticle Schrödinger equation

The center-of-mass principle is the key to the rapid computation of the interaction of a large number of classical particles. Electrons governed by the multiparticle Schrodinger equation have a much more complicated interaction mainly due to their spatial extent and the antisymmetry constraint on the total wave function of the combined electron system. We present a center-of-mass principle for quantum particles that accounts for this spatial extent, the antisymmetry constraint, and the potential operators. We use it to construct an algorithm for computing a size-consistent approximate wave function for large systems with simple geometries.