Few-body problems involving Coulomb or gravitational interactions between
pairs of particles, whether in classical or quantum physics, are generally
handled through a standard multipole expansion of the two-body potentials. We
discuss an alternative based on a compact, cylindrical Green's function
expansion that should have wide applicability throughout physics. Two-electron
"direct" and "exchange" integrals in many-electron quantum systems are
evaluated to illustrate the procedure which is more compact than the standard
one using Wigner coefficients and Slater integrals.Comment: 10 pages, latex/Revtex4, 1 figure
