There are No Unfilled Shells in Hartree-Fock Theory

Hartree-Fock theory is supposed to yield a picture of atomic shells which may or may not be filled according to the atom's position in the periodic table. We prove that shells are always completely filled in an exact Hartree-Fock calculation. Our theorem generalizes to any system having a two-body interaction that, like the Coulomb potential, is repulsive.