Virial expansion coefficients in the harmonic approximation

The virial expansion method is applied within a harmonic approximation to an interacting N-body system of identical fermions. We compute the canonical partition functions for two and three particles to get the two lowest orders in the expansion. The energy spectrum is carefully interpolated to reproduce ground-state properties at low temperature and the noninteracting high-temperature limit of constant virial coefficients. This resembles the smearing of shell effects in finite systems with increasing temperature. Numerical results are discussed for the second and third virial coefficients as functions of dimension, temperature, interaction, and transition temperature between low- and high-energy limits.