New lower bounds for the binding energy of a quantum-mechanical system of
interacting particles are presented. The new bounds are expressed in terms of
two-particle quantities and improve the conventional bounds of the Hall-Post
type. They are constructed by considering not only the energy in the
two-particle system, but also the structure of the pair wave function. We apply
the formal results to various numerical examples, and show that in some cases
dramatic improvement over the existing bounds is reached.Comment: 29 pages, 5 figures, to be published in Phys. Rev.