The strictly-correlated electron functional for spherically symmetric systems revisited

The strong-interaction limit of the Hohenberg-Kohn functional defines a multimarginal optimal transport problem with Coulomb cost. From physical arguments, the solution of this limit is expected to yield strictly-correlated particle positions, related to each other by co-motion functions (or optimal maps), but the existence of such a deterministic solution in the general three-dimensional case is still an open question. A conjecture for the co-motion functions for radially symmetric densities was presented in Phys.~Rev.~A {\bf 75}, 042511 (2007), and later used to build approximate exchange-correlation functionals for electrons confined in low-density quantum dots. Colombo and Stra [Math.~M…