Abstract The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the usefulness of density matrix techniques in the determination of the ground state energy of certain atomic systems. Use of the method, currently under development, results in a lower energy bound in contrast with the Rayleigh-Ritz method which yields an upper bound. The former technique is illustrated for the C⁺⁺ atomic system. It was found that the Pauli Principle was being violated even when the 2-particle density matrix is expanded in...