Orthogonalization of fermion k-body operators and representability

The reduced k-particle density matrix of a density matrix on finite-dimensional, fermion Fock space can be defined as the image under the orthogonal projection in the Hilbert-Schmidt geometry onto the space of k-body observables. A proper understanding of this projection is therefore intimately related to the representability problem, a long-standing open problem in computational quantum chemistry. Given an orthonormal basis in the finite-dimensional one-particle Hilbert space, we explicitly construct an orthonormal basis of the space of Fock space operators which restricts to an orthonormal basis of the space of k-body operators for all k.