Universal ground-state properties of free fermions in a

The ground-state properties of N spinless free fermions in a d-dimensional confining potential are studied. We find that any n-point correlation function has a simple determinantal structure that allows us to compute several properties exactly for large N. We show that the average density has a finite support with an edge, and near this edge the density exhibits a universal (valid for a wide class of potentials) scaling behavior for large N. The associated edge scaling function is computed exactly and generalizes to any d the edge electron gas result of Kohn and Mattsson in d = 3 (Koh