Noninteracting fermions, placed in a system with a continuous density of states, may have zeros in the N -fermion canonical partition function on the positive real β axis (or very close to it), even for a small number of particles. This results in a singular free energy, and instability in other thermal properties of the system. In the context of trapped fermions in a harmonic oscillator, these zeros are shown to be unphysical. Our results are also applicable to mean-field canonical calculations for fermions. By contrast, similar bosonic calculations with continuous density of states yield sensible results.Long back, Lee and Yang [1,2] pointed out that the onset of a phase transition could be deduced by studying the zeros of the grand partition function on the complex fugacity plane. As the number of particles goes to infinity in the thermodynamic limit, the complex zeros tend to pinch the real fugacity axis, signalling a phase transition. Later, Fisher [3] found a similar behaviour of the canonical partition function Z N (β) on the complex β (inverse temperature) plane near a phase transition. Given a single-particle partition function Z 1 (β), Z N (β) may be calculated exactly for noninteracting bosons or fermions using recursion relations [4]. The single-particle partition function may arise from a one-body trapping potential, or may be the result of a calculation in a many-body problem. In this context, Mülken et al. [5] have studied the pattern of Fisher zeros for trapped noninteracting bosons in a harmonic oscillator. As the number of bosons was increased, the real positive β axis tended to be pinched at T = T c , the Bose-Einstein condensation temperature for spatial dimensions d > 1. The behaviour of the heat capacity as a function of T also showed a sharp peak for large N at T = T c . As expected, this was found both for the exact single-particle density of states of a harmonic oscillator (HO), and for the corresponding (asymptotic) continuous density of states. Mülken et al.[5] examined the distribution of zeros on the complex β plane to classify the order of the phase transition in finite systems. Similar analyses were done with the Fisher zeros in interacting statistical models by Janke et al. [6,7].Noninteracting fermions trapped in a HO have not been studied in this context, presumably because no irregularity or phase transition is expected. However, a classical version of this formalism has been applied in a model for the thermodynamic properties of nuclear multifragmentation in heavy-ion collisions [8]. In this paper, we are especially interested in the effects of the Fermi statistics on the analytical properties of the canonical partition function. In particular, we compare results obtained from the exact single-particle partition function from the discrete HO energy spectrum, with those obtained using a continuous density of states approximation. The latter is widely used in the grand canonical formalism. With the exact HO density of states, the fermionic system shows no evidence of any phase tr...