Virtues and flaws of the Pauli potential

Quantum simulations of complex fermionic systems suffer from a variety of challenging problems. In an effort to circumvent these challenges, simpler ‘semi-classical’ approaches have been used to mimic fermionic correlations through a fictitious ‘Pauli potential’. In this contribution we examine two issues. First, we address some of the inherent difficulties in a widely used version of the Pauli potential. Second, we refine such a potential in a manner consistent with the most basic properties of a cold Fermi gas, such as its momentum distribution and its two-body correlation function.