  The Lieb-Oxford inequality provides a lower bound on the Coulomb energy of a
classical system of $N$ identical charges only in terms of their one-particle
density. We prove here a new estimate on the best constant in this inequality.
Numerical evaluation provides the value 1.58, which is a significant
improvement to the previously known value 1.64. The best constant has recently
been shown to be larger than 1.44. In a second part, we prove that the constant
can be reduced to 1.25 when the inequality is restricted to Hartree-Fock
states. This is the first proof that the exchange term is always much lower
than the full indirect Coulomb energy.
